Psychoanalysis K

**STILL A WIP**
NEG
 1NC Shell – Generic
The performance of radical demands against the state fails
LUNDBERG 2012 (Chris, comm studies prof at UNC, Lacan in Public)
The demands of student revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for interrogating hysteria as a po liti cal practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added to a list of dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a

“Danger”
dynamic inherent to all demands for recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Seattle Independent Media project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of representation.

functions as a a way of reaffirming the protestors’ imaginary agency

sign of something more than inclusion, over processes of globalization. If danger represents an

demands to be recognized as dangerous

assertion of agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then are doubly hysterical. Such

are also demands

demands the state might extend its love by recognizing the dangerousness of
for a certain kind of love, namely,

the one who makes the demand. At the level the demand’s rhetorical function, dangerousness is
metonymically connected with the idea that average citizens can effect change or be in the prevailing order, that they might

recognized as agents who can command the state to reaffirm their agency by
, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, Mexican

recognizing their dangerousness. The rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of
the state or governing apparatus’s interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state
policies as a point for the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the state’s love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state: otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute a reaffirmation of a
hysterical subject position: they reaffirm not only the subject’s marginality in the global system but the danger that protestors present to the global system.

There are three practical implications for this formation.

the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning and satisfaction of the political
First, for the hysteric

project the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that
. Although there is always a nascent political potential in performance, in this case

animate content of the demand .

demand allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics
Second, . This is not to say

when antagonistic engagement is

that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say thatthe end point of politics, the field with certain institutions read as

of political options is constrained. Demands to be recognized as relatively powerful dangerous by the Mexican government or as a antiglobalization force by the

function at the cost of

WTO often thinking through alternative
addressing how practices of globalization are reaffirmed at the level of consumption, of identity, and so on or in

political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the state and the state’s actions.

an addiction to the refusal of demands

Paradoxically, the third danger is that to retreat creates a paralyzing disposition toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics

from the “politics of policy debate a commitment

and public .”45 Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of “theory” and its relation to left politics, perhaps hysterical

to marginality informs the impulse to eschew engagements with institutional debate. An in some sectors institutions and

addiction to the state’s refusal of ten makes the perfect the enemy of the good, implying a stifling
commitment to po liti cal purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of enjoyment dependent on
refusal a politics is in the incredibly
, dependent on a kind of paternal “no.” Instead of seeing institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for contingent or relative goods, hysterical

difficult position of taking an addressee that it assumes represents the totality of the political (such as the state)

field; simultaneously it understands its addressee as only a locus of prohibition constitutively and necessarily .

At the level of the content of the demand, the

These paradoxes become nearly insufferable when one makes an analytical cut between the content of a demand and its rhetorical functionality.

state or institutions are figured as illegitimate, that represent globalization but as morally and politically compromised because of their misdeeds. Here there is an assertion of agency, because

the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of desire the demand is , the identity produced in hysterical not only intimately tied to but is ultimately

dependent on the continuing existence of the hegemonic order At the level of affective state, , or institution.

investment, the state or institution is automatically figured as the legitimate authority over its domain. As

Demand constitutes the Other as already

Lacan puts it: “demand in itself . . . is demand of a presence or of an absence . . . pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy.

possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone
by which they are satisfied .”46
Desire is not natural or inevitable—rather, we are taught to desire by imagining the
desire of the Other
HEWITSON 2010 (Owen, Middlesex University, Centre for Psychoanalysis, “What Does Lacan Say
About… Desire?,” Lacan Online, May 9, https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-
about-desire/)

There are two relatively straightforward ways in which we can understand one of Lacan’s most well-known maxims, that “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other ”? (Seminar XI, p.235). Firstly, that desire is essentially a desire for
recognition from this ‘Other’; secondly that desire is for the thing that we suppose the Other desires, which is to say, the thing that the Other lacks.

In commenting on the way that desire repeats and insists through the transference and the signifier in psychoanalytic work, Lacan verifies our first reading, that desire is fundamentally a desire for
recognition :

“The necessary and sufficient reason for the repetitive insistence of these desires in the transference and their permanent remembrance in a signifier that repression has appropriated – that is, in which the repressed returns – is found if one accepts the idea that in these determinations the desire for recognition dominates the desire that is to be recognised, preserving it as such until it is recognised” (Ecrits, 431).

In other words, desire pushes for recognition. It is less a question of what we desire as much as it is that we be recognised. Moreover, Lacan believes that this dependence on the other for recognition is responsible for structuring not only our desires, but even our drives:

“To return psychoanalysis to a veridical path, it is worth recalling that analysis managed to go so far in the revelation of man’s desires only by following, in the veins of neurosis and the marginal subjectivity of the individual, the structure proper to a desire that thus proves to model it at an unexpected depth – namely, the desire to have his desire recognised. This desire, in which it is literally verified that man’s desire is alienated in the other’s desire, in effect structures the drives discovered in analysis, in accordance with all the vicissitudes of the logical substitutions in their
source, aim, and object” (Ecrits, 343).

it is also the desire for what we believe the other desires

So firstly our desire is a desire for recognition. But secondly . We can see this as a consequence of the desire for recognition:

what we experience as our own desire is always going to be the other’s desire, the other that we , in a certain sense,

desire recognition from .

We can understand this ‘other’ in two ways : first as , indicated with a lower case o, the other person , our counterpart, our semblable; second, as the Other with a

capital O, a more ‘otherly’ other, the essential feature of which being that although we never know quite what their desire is, we are on a constant quest to find an answer. This big Other might be another person in their essentially enigmatic dimension; or it might be

the assumed virtues, morals and ideals of our culture and upbringing. One of the reasons why it is useful to put the capital O on this maxim of man’s desire being the desire of the Other is that it renders this ‘otherness’ of the Other
more stark.

We never fully know exactly what the Other desires or why it desires it, or in what way we ourselves might be implicated. For the subject, desire is thus a constant process of questioning what the Other has or desires to have. In an address to the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1951 Lacan sums this up in saying:

“The object of man’s desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an object desired by someone else. One object can become equivalent to another, owing to the effect produced by this intermediary, in making it possible for objects to be exchanged and compared. This process tends to diminish the special significance of any one particular object, but at the same time it
brings into view the existence of objects without number” (Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 11-17; reproduced in Furman and Levy (eds), Influential Papers from the 1950s, Karnac, 2003, p.295 – 296).

Equally, in the late sixties Lacan says:

“Desire full stop is always the desire of the Other. Which basically means that we are always asking the Other what desires he ” (My Teaching, p.38).

This is the second way to understand the idea of our desire being the desire of the Other: as a desire for what we think the Other desires or lacks. So taking these two readings of Lacan’s maxim together, the lesson Lacan has for us is that the consequence of striving for recognition from

the Other is that we can never ‘simply’ desire. Our desire is not something innate inside us. Indeed, for Lacan our desires are not even our own – we always have to desire in the second degree, finding a path to our own desire and

our own recognition by asking the question of what the Other desires. We have to desire things that are desirable to the Other – whether other people or the Otherness of our socio-
cultural context – and through that process the desire of the Other becomes our own. This is an idea that has its heritage in Hegel’s philsophy, as Lacan acknowledges in the Ecrits:

“Man’s very desire is constituted, he [Hegel] tells us, under the sign of mediation: it is the desire to have one’s desire recognised. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation. This is clear from his earliest needs, in that, for example, his very food must be prepared; and we find this anew in the whole development of his satisfaction, beginning with the conflict between master and slave, through the entire dialectic of labour” (Ecrits , 182).

To desire is to answer the question ‘What does the Other desire?’

However, this does not simply mean that we just identify with the other and automatically take whatever they desire as our own. Indeed, it is not always clear what the Other wants. When we call our desires our own what we really mean is only that we have succeeded in seeking out the gaps in the desire of the Other, and carving out a space for ourselves there:

“… It must be posited that, as a characteristic of an animal at the mercy of language, man’s desire is the Other’s desire.

This concerns a totally different function than that of primary identification mentioned above, for it does not involve the assumption by the subject of the other’s insignia, but rather the condition that the subject find the constitutive structure of his desire in the same gap opened up by the effect of signifiers in those who come to represent the Other for him, insofar as his demand is subjected to them” (Ecrits, 628).

Although Lacan’s maxim is that man’s desire is the desire of the Other, he does not picture our desires as clones of the Other’s. Rather, part of the job of creating our own subjectivity is to generate some autonomy between us and the Other, which in the first instance is manifested as the mother, or mothere r. In order for him to become a subject, the helpless infant must first identify the mother’s desire, and then pick a position in response to it. A baby may get fed when he cries, whether or not his cry was a cry for food, for warmth, or for a change of nappy. The most urgent task in the development of his own desire is in coming up with an answer to the question of what the Other (in this case, his mother) wants, and seeking for himself a position in respect of that unfathomable ‘x’. Lacan characterises this dilemma in the following way in Seminar V:

“It is not just frustration as such, namely something more or less in the real order which has been giv en or which has not been given to the subject, which is the important point; it is the way that the subject has aimed at, has located this desire of the other which is the mother’s desire, and with respect to this desire it is to make him recognise, or pass, or propose to become with respect to something which is an X of desire in the mother, to become or not the one who responds, to become or not the desired being” (Seminar V, 12.03.58., p.3 -4).

In that seminar Lacan introduces the famous graph of desire, and the paper entitled ‘The Subversion of the Subject’ in the Ecrits follows on from the presentation of the graph of desire in Seminar V. Lacan makes the question of what the (m)Other desires – ‘Che vuoi?‘, ‘What do you want?’ – a kind of rites of passage for the infant, the answer to which will give the him a place from where he can answer the same question put to himself – what do I desire? Later in life this question might be echoed in a psychoanalysis as the patient lies on the couch asking himself what the analyst wants of him. Here is how Lacan puts this in the paper in the Ecrits:

“This is why the Other’s question [la question de l’Autre ] – that comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply – which takes some such form as ‘Che vuoi?‘, ‘What do you want?’, is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire, assuming that, thanks to the know-how of a partner known as a psychoanalyst, he takes up that question, even without knowing it, in the following form: ‘What does he want from me?’

It is this superimposed level of structure that will nudge my graph [see Graph 3] towards its complete d form, inserting itself there first like the outline of a question mark planted in the circle of the capital A, for Other, symbolising the question it signifies with a disconcerting collineation” (Ecrits , 814-815).

there will forever be a

However, even if he has succeeded in constructing his own desire from the answer he has given to the question of the Other’s desire, the fact that his desire has been premised on the Other’s desire means that

world of difference between what desires and what actually wants. The two will never be in the same he he

place at the same time . When the question of what the Other desires manifests itself, or is brought to the fore, it,

“… Leaves it up to the subject to butt up against the question of his essence, in that he may not misrecognise that what he desires presents itself to him as what he does not want – a form assumed by negation in which misrecognition is inserted in a very odd way, the misrecognition, of which he himself is unaware, by which he transfers the permanence of his desire to an ego that is nevertheless obviously intermittent, and, inversely, protects himself from his desire by attributing to it these very intermittences” (Ecrits, 814-815).

There results a gap between unconscious desire and the desire of your ego ( what you might be said to want ), as expressed in demand:
We begin generate new enemies who must be destroyed
STAVRAKAKIS 99 (Yannis Stavrakakis has PhD degrees from the ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’
programme at the University of Essex, “Lacan and the Political”, p.93-94, 10/3/99)

fantasy can only exist as the negation of real dislocation

In the light of our theoretical framework, , as a negation of the generalised lack, the antagonism that crosses the field of the social.

any promise of absolute positivity

Fantasy negates the real by promising to realise it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production. Yet the construction of

is violent
an imaginarised false real sustained by the exclusion of a non-domesticated real which always
founded on a /negative origin; it is real a

returns to its place the fantasy of a harmonious social order

. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of negativity. As we have already pointed out, utopian can only

can remain appealing only if it attributes

be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. Since the realisation of the utopian fantasy is impossible, utopian discourse hegemonically this

its own impossibility to an alien intruder

impossibility that is to say, ultimate . As Sartre has put it the anti-Semite is in the unhappy position of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy (Sartre,
1995:28). The impossibility of the Nazi utopia cannot be incorporated within utopian discourse. This truth is not easy to admit; it is easier to attribute all negativity to the Jew: All that is bad in society (crises, wars, famines, upheavals, and revolts) is directly or indirectly imputable to him.

The anti-Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ill- contrived, for then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the result that man would be found to be the master of his own destinies, burdened with an agonising and infinite

localises the evil of the universe in the Jews

responsibility. Thus he all We need enemies . (Sartre, 1995:40) 12 As Jerrold Post has pointed out, we are always bound to those we hate:

to keep our treasured and idealised selves intact The fantasy of attaining a (Post, 1996:28-9). And this for fear of being free (Sartre, 1995:27).

perfect harmonious world can only be sustained through a certain particularity

, of realising the universal, the construction/localisation of

which has to be eliminated

cannot be assimilated but, instead, The . There exists then a crucial dialectic between the universal fantasy of utopia and the particularity of the always local enemy who is posited as negating it.

result is always the same: The tragic paradox of utopianism has been that instead of bringing
of this dialectic

about stability
, as it promised, a system of final and permanent it brought totalitarian coercion
, it gave rise to utter restlessness, and in place of a reconciliation between human freedom and social cohesion, .
Links
 Generic
False Connection Link – the aff’s assessment of harms which [SUFFERING GROUP] face
is only an expression of their ego-centered perspective of the problem.
Hook 18 (Derek, Associate Professor in Psychology at Duquesne University, Professor in Psychology at
the University of Pretoria, former lecturer at the London School of Economics and Birkbeck College, “Six
Moments in Lacan,” p.16-17)

We cannot,
In terms of the symbolic axis of communication then, to reiterate the point made above, we are concerned with something more than merely taking another’s perspective, which, after all, would not remove us from the level of imaginary inter- subjectivity.

imagine a referee, who in order to make a crucial decision, adopts an empathic posture, and puts
for example,

him or herself in the subjective position of one of the players what is often taken as an ideal of . . . So,

communicative efficacy (or rudimentary ethical gesture) – the attempt to ‘see something from the indeed, as a

other’s point of view’ – is not necessarily a goal of effective communicative change . It is likewise, from a Lacanian perspective at least,

there is no easy stepping outside of ego-subjectivity within the perspective of the ego
decidedly not an ethical ideal. That is to say:

itself; there is no imaginary assumption of ‘how the other sees it’ that succeeds in bracketing one’s
own ego the attempt to ‘put myself in the shoes of an other’ occurs via one’s own ego so
. This paradox should be emphasized: ,

the very gesture of empathic inter-subjectivity really only reaffirms my ego (i.e. the logic here is that of
how I think they see it) it is only via the Other, by means of the symbolic . A maxim of Lacanian clinical practice comes to the fore here:

enunciations that patients make, that they and what they are speaking about can be approached (however indirectly)

in a (relatively) ego-bracketed fashion clinicians should be attuned not to the inferred .6 Michael Miller (2011) accordingly stresses that

content of a patient’s discourse, but ‘to the letter’ of actually enunciated speech. Such a literal approach ,

involves less of a leap of theoretical faith than does an approach ‘which takes as its source the
he stresses,

inferred content of the patient’s speech and behaviour Inferring contents, distilling apparent ’ (p. 52).

themes, or making interpretive assumptions about what patients say, invariably says more about the
analyst’s own ego than it does about the patient. canian clinicians remain wary of attempts It is for these reasons that La

to see things from the perspective of others and avoid making assumptions about what their patients
are thinking or feeling. In such instances, the other becomes all too easily a prop for the (clinician’s)
ego’s own self-realization .7 Hence the Lacanian critique of ‘counter-transference’ as a means of interpreting the patient’s current emotional state (i.e. comments such as: ‘I am feeling anxious in this setting, which makes me wonder if you are
feeling agitated’). For Lacan these are at basis ego- centred interpretations that foreground the clinician’s own ego even while claiming access to the other.8

Psychoanalytic theory produces its own desire in order to fill the hole of nothingness created by
subjectivity. All drives to imperialistically obtain the object fail because they’ll never amount to the
objet petit a.
McGowan 2013  [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] //afre

the subject doesn’t seek knowledge but instead desires.

The politics of the death drive begins with the revolutionary idea of subjectivity that Freud uncovers: his understanding that

progress becomes untenable, and the subject becomes self-destructive.

Following from this idea, the traditional notion of On the one hand, earlier thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche anticipate Freud’s revolutionary turn from the

w our quest for knowledge serves as a guise for a more fundamental quest for satisfaction
subject of knowledge to the subject of desire. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche emphasize ho , and in this way they overturn the traditional philosophical conception of

the subject is the result of instinct being

subjectivity.1 But on the other hand, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche fail to grasp the signifi cance of the human animal’s entrance into the fi eld of knowledge or language. For both, will exists on one side and knowledge (or representation) on the other, and will is nothing but a biological fact. Freud’s conception of desiring subjectivity recognizes that

deformed through its submission to the realm of knowledge . Though we act on behalf of desire rather than knowledge, we do so, paradoxically, because our instincts are mediated by knowledge. Freud’s subject, in contrast to Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s, never experiences pure biological instincts but rather a desire that remains unconscious.2

ly prioritizing desire requires an idea of the unconscious not simply as the site of a will or instinct associated with human
Authentical

animality but as a radically diff erent psychic scene fundamentally irreducible to consciousness . 26 Subjectivity For Freud, the subject
doesn’t know its unconscious desire not because of its failure to grasp its continued animality but because unconscious desire
gives birth to the subject and always remains in front of every project of knowledge . Freud’s revolution is a genuine one — tied to a unique vision of how
subjectivity emerges.3 Th e political implications of psychoanalytic thought begin with its understanding of the genesis of subjectivity, an understanding that sets psychoanalysis apart from other political theorizing of all stripes. The

foundational status of loss for the subject entails a politics centered around the repetition of loss rather than the achievement
of the good. Psychoanalytic thought sees us as condemned to the repetition of loss, but it aims at freeing us to take up a new relation to this repetition. Th is new relation is the emancipatory project of psychoanalytic
politics. Initially, as Freud conceives it, the human animal is an autoerotic being that has no object world . The distinction between self and other (or
subject and object) is not a fact of birth but a psychical achievement . The infant’s autoerotic mode does not yet differentiate between itself and objects, and the being finds some degree of satisfaction in its undifferentiated existence. This autoeroticism is not yet even narcissism. The narcissistic relationship of the subject with its own ego requires the formation of an ego,

which can only form through a break in the autoerotic circuit. As Freud puts it in “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” “A unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. Th e auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very first; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism — a new psychical action — in order to bring about narcissism.”4 Because the ego is just a special sort of object (one that competes with other objects for the subject’s libido), it can form and the subject can become narcissistic only after

a new psychical action” — produces a division out of the undifferentiated autoeroticism of the human
the subject has created the division between subject and object. This creative act — what Freud calls “

animal. The subject as such emerges through the experience of loss. It is the loss of a part of the subject — an initial act of
sacrifice — that creates both subject and object, the object emerging through this act as what the subject has lost of itself . The
subject takes an interest in the object world because it forms this world around its lost object . As Jacques Lacan notes, “Never, in our concrete experience of analytic theory, do we do without the notion of 27 The Formation of Subjectivity the lack

of the object as central. It is not a negative, but the very spring for the relation of the subject to the world.”5 The loss of the object generates a world around this loss to which the subject can relate. Obviously, no one literally creates objects through an initial act of sacrifice of an actual body part. This would be too much to ask. But the psychical act of sacrifice allows for a distinction to develop where none existed before and simultaneously directs the subject’s desire toward the object world. In his breakthrough essay “Negation,” Freud describes this process as follows: “Th

. The fi rst and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing

e antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the fi rst. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there

is, not to fi nd an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince
oneself that it is still there.”6 Th ough Freud doesn’t use terms from linguistics, it is clear that he is making reference to the subject’s alienation in language and that he sees this alienation as the key to the
emergence of both the subject and the object. When the subject submits to the imperatives of language, it enters into an indirect relation with the

object world. Th e speaking being does not relate to books, pencils, and paper but to “books,” “pencils,” and “paper.” Th e
signifi er intervenes between the subject and the object that the subject perceives. Th e subject’s alienation into language
deprives it of immediate contact with the object world . And yet, in the above passage from “Negation,” Freud conceives of the subject’s entrance into
language — its “capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a
presentation without the external object having still to be there ” — as the event that produces the very distinction between subject and object. Th is means that the indirectness
or mediation introduced by language deprives the subject of a direct relation to the object world that it never had. Prior to its immersion in the mediation of language, the subject had no object at all — not a privileged relation to

the subject’s willingness to accede to its alienation in language is the fi rst

objects but a complete absence of relationality as such due to its autoeroticism. In this sense,

creative act, a sacrifi ce that produces the objects that the subject cannot directly access . Language is important not for its own sake but because it is the site of
our 28 Subjectivity founding sacrifi ce. We know that the subject has performed this act of sacrifice when we witness the subject functioning as a being of language, but the sacrifi ce is not an act that the subject takes up on its

own. Others always impose the entry into language on the subject. Th eir exhortations and incentives to speak prompt the
emergence of the speaking subject. But the subject’s openness to alienation in language, its willingness to sacrifi ce a part of itself in order to become a speaking subject, suggests a lack in being itself
prior to the entry into language. Th at is, the act through which the subject cedes the privileged object and becomes a subject coincides with language but is irreducible to it. The subject engages in the act

of sacrifi ce because it does not fi nd its initial autoeroticism perfectly satisfying — the unity of the autoerotic being is not perfect — and this lack of
complete satisfaction produces the opening through which language and society grab onto the subject through its alienating
process. If the initial autoerotic state of the human animal were perfectly satisfying, no one would begin to speak, and
subjectivity would never form. Speaking as such testifi es to an initial wound in our animal being and in being itself. But subjectivity emerges only out of a self-wounding. Even though others encourage the
infant to abandon its autoerotic state through a multitude of inducements, the initial loss that constitutes subjectivity is always and necessarily self-infl icted. Subjectivity has a fundamentally masochistic form, and it continually

repeats the masochistic act that founds it. Th e act of sacrifi ce opens the door to the promise of a satisfaction that autoerotic isolation forecloses,
which is why the incipient subject abandons the autoerotic state and accedes to the call of sociality . But the term “sacrifi ce” is misleading insofar as it
suggests that the subject has given up a wholeness (with itself or with its parent) that exists prior to being lost. In the act of sacrifi ce, the incipient subject gives up something

that it doesn’t have. Th e initial loss that founds subjectivity is not at all substantial; it is the ceding of nothing. Th rough this defi ning gesture, the subject
sacrifi ces its lost object into being. But if the subject cedes nothing, this initial act of sacrifi ce seems profoundly unnecessary. Why can’t the subject emerge without it? Why is the experience of loss
necessary for the subject to constitute itself qua subject? Th e answer lies in the diff erence between need and desire. While the needs of the human animal are not dependent on

the experience of loss, the subject’s desires are . 29 The Formation of Subjectivity It is the initial act of sacrifice that gives birth to desire: the
subject sacrifi ces nothing in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire . As Richard Boothby puts it in his unequaled explanation
of the psychoanalytic conception of the emergence of desire, “Th e destruction and loss of the object . . . opens up a symbolic dimension in which what was lost might be recovered in a new form.”7 He adds: “Sacrifi ce serves to

Th e subject’s desire is
constitute the very matrix of desire. Th e essential function of sacrifi ce is less do ut des, I give so that you might give, than do ut desidero: I give in order that I might desire.”8

oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing as a positive entity and only exists insofar as it is lost. Th is is why one
can never attain the lost object or the object that causes one to desire .9 Th e coming-into-being of this object originates the subject of desire, but, having no substance, the
object can never become an empirical object of desire. We may see an object of desire as embodying the lost object, but whenever we obtain this

object, we discover its emptiness. Th e lost object is constitutively rather than empirically lost. Eating Nothing In this light, we can see the anorexic as the model for all desiring subjectivity. Most cultural critics justifi ably see anorexia as the

product of oppressive defi nitions of femininity that abound in contemporary society and force women to starve themselves in order to fi t the ideals of feminine beauty. According to Naomi Wolf ’s classic popular account in Th e Beauty Myth, the ideal of thinness became a way of controlling women — disciplining their bodies — aft er the idea of natural female inferiority began to evanesce.10 Th e anorexic embodies female victimization: she has internalized a patriarchal ideal and does violence to her own body in order to live up to this ideal. But the problem with this
analysis is that the anorexic doesn’t just try to embody the ideal of feminine beauty.11 She goes too far in her pursuit of thinness and comes to inhabit a body far from the ideal. Even when everyone tells her that she no longer looks good, that she is too thin, the anorexic continues to lose weight. It is for this reason that many feminists have seen her as a subversive fi gure. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, “Neither a ‘disorder’ of the ego nor, as popular opinion has it, a ‘dieting disease’ gone out of control, anorexia can, like the phantom limb, be a kind of mourning 30 Subjectivity
for a pre-Oedipal (i.e., pre-castrated) body and a corporeal connection to the mother that women in patriarchy are required to abandon. Anorexia is a form of protest at the social meaning of the female body.”12 Grosz accounts for the excessiveness of anorexia by aligning it with feminist resistance to patriarchy rather than obsequious submission to it. But she aligns the anorexic with wholeness and the maternal bond rather than with the lost object. In this sense, she misses the true radicality of the anorexic, a radicality that stems from the power of the anorexic’s desire.

Th e anorexic doesn’t simply refuse to eat but eats nothing, the nothing that is the lost object. While all positive forms of food fail to address the subject’s lack, nothing does speak to the subject’s desire and allows that desire to sustain itself. Th e anorexic starves not because she can’t fi nd, in the mode of Kafk a’s hunger artist, any food that would satisfy her but because she has found a satisfying food, a food that nourishes the desiring subject rather than the living being. Th e logic of anorexia lays bare the hidden workings of desire that operate within every subject .

Subjects believe that they pursue various objects of desire (a new car, a new house, a new romantic partner, and so on) and
that these objects have an intrinsic attraction, but the real engine for their desire resides in the nothing that the subject has
given up and that every object tries and fails to represent . Objects of desire are desirable only insofar as they attempt to
represent the impossible lost object, which is what the anorexic reveals. Still, the anorexic is exceptional; most nonanorexic subjects imagine that their lost object can be found in something rather than
nothing. Despite its resonances with the structure of desire, anorexia cannot be dissociated from the imposition of the ideal of thinness as a mode of controlling female subjectivity. Th ough this ideal distorts the anorexic’s
relationship to her own body, it also renders the nature of desire itself apparent. Th e impossible ideal of perfect thinness allows the anorexic subject to avow, albeit unconsciously, the structural impossibility of desire itself. Unlike
male subjects (or other female subjects who manage to distance themselves from the ideal), the anorexic cannot avoid confronting the impossibility of her object. Th e oppressive ideal of perfect thinness allows the anorexic to

Understanding the impossible nature of the lost object — what the anorexic makes clear — allows us to rethink the
bear witness with her body to the truth of desire.13

nature of the political act. Rather than being the successful achievement of some object, the accomplishment of some social
good, the political act involves insisting on one’s desire in the face of its impossibility, which is precisely what occurs in the
death drive. The key to a politics of the death drive is grasping , in the fashion of the anorexic, the nothingness of the object
and thereby finding satisfaction in the drive itself . But the subject’s relationship to its object inherently creates an illusion
that makes this possibility almost impossible . Though the lost object that initiates subjectivity has no substance, its status for
the subject belies its nothingness. For the subject, the originary lost object is the object that seems to hold the key to the subject’s
very ability to enjoy. Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion: the loss of the object retroactively
causes a prior state of completion to arise — a state of completion that never actually existed — and the object itself bears the
promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state.14 In short, it promises to fi ll in the subject’s lack and answer its desire .
As a result of this investment on the part of the subject, the initial lost object becomes the engine for all the subject’s subsequent desiring . Without the initial act of

sacrifice, the would-be subject neither desires nor enjoys but instead suff ocates in a world of self-presence, a self-presence in which one has no freedom whatsoever. Th rough the loss of the privileged

object, one frees oneself from the complete domination of (parental or social) authority by creating a lack that no authority can fi ll.
Ceding the object is thus the founding act of subjectivity and the fi rst free act . Every subsequent effort by authority to give the
subject what it lacks will come up short — or, more correctly, will go too far, because only nothing can fill the gap within the subject. For this reason,
dissatisfaction and disappointment are correlative with freedom: when we experience the authority’s failure to give us what
we want, at that moment we also experience our distance from the authority and our radical freedom as subjects .

Nostalgia stains the political goal with a false image of a nonlacking subjectivity—it’s a
political tool that never follows through
McGowan 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

Even though loss is a constitutive experience that founds the subject in its relation to the object, this initial loss
misleads us into believing that we have lost something substantial . We often fail to see that we have lost nothing
and that our lost object is simply the embodiment of this nothing . The belief in the substantiality of the lost object
fuels the prevalence of nostalgia as a mode of relating to our origins. We dream of recovering the object and
restoring the complete enjoyment that we believe ourselves to have once had prior to the experience of loss. This enjoyment never
existed, and the recovery of the object, though it may bring some degree of pleasure, always brings disappointment as well, which is why sustaining our feeling of
nostalgia depends on not realizing the return to the past that the nostalgic subject longs for. By insisting that loss is constitutive for the subject, psychoanalytic
thought works to combat nostalgia and its poisoning of contemporary politics. Nostalgia
permits us to avoid seeing the necessity of the
link between enjoyment and loss. Seen in a nostalgic light, enjoyment gains a purity that it can never actually have . It
becomes an experience that completes the subject and provides plenitude rather than an experience that derives
from the subject’s partiality and lack. The false image of enjoyment that nostalgia portrays is the source of its
widespread appeal. As subjects, we constantly turn ourselves toward both our individual past and our collective
cultural history in an att empt to fi nd what we have lost. The story of Eden, the origin myth of Judeo-Christian society, reveals dramatically the privileged place of nostalgia in our society. While the
doctrine of original sin attempts to represent the necessity of an original loss, the account of humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden counterbalances this doctrine with an image of lost perfection. Prior to the act of eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,
humanity had a direct relation to its privileged object. One could enjoy in the Garden of Eden without restraint. This particular origin myth has the power that it does because it ties in with the subject’s self-deception that emanates from its experience of original loss. Th e very experience

we explicitly affirm ourselves as subjects of

of loss prompts us to believe that we have lost something, and the Eden myth fi lls in the content of what we have lost. If we accept the Eden myth (even as a metaphor),

nostalgia, subjects who have lost something rather than nothing. But this mode of subjectivity goes far beyond our
ideas about creation. It manifests itself in the privileging of the words of the Founding Fathers in political discourse, the power of fashion trends that mimic earlier eras, and the popularity of historical dramas in the cinema. To take just the last example,
spectators go to films like Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), and Cinderella Man (Ron Howard, 2005) because they depict the past as a heroic time when people had an 41 The Formation of Subjectivity ability to enjoy directly the privileged
object. Even though William Wallace (Mel Gibson) dies in his fi ght for freedom in Braveheart, he nonetheless has the appearance of a nonlacking subject, a subject defined by his wholeness rather than his loss. Th e image of this wholeness on the screen appeals to spectators’ nostalgia

. Nostalgia reaches into almost every aspect of contemporary culture, even those places where it
for what they believe they once had

appears to be most absent. The contemporary idealization of the child seems on the surface to indicate a rejection of nostalgia, an investment in the future rather than the past. In No Future, his superb account of this phenomenon, Lee Edelman
criticizes the cult of the child for precisely this reason. He sees the privileging of the child as part of a heterosexist ideology oriented toward the future and toward the reproduction of an oppressive social order. He claims: “Th e Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order
and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”32 For Edelman, the image of the child predominates as a result of our need to believe in a better future. What he doesn’t address fully is the psychic source of this image’s power. We idealize the child not
simply because it embodies our hope for the future but primarily because it provides us with a look at what we believe we have lost. Th e innocent child appears to be nonlacking, not subject to loss. When we devote ourselves to the image of the child, we affirm an image of our own lost
completeness. Belief in the purity of the child is the positing of our own lost purity. We fi nd violence against children so much more abhorrent than violence against adults because of this association of childhood with a lost purity. In the United States, Megan’s Law (rendering public the
addresses of those convicted of sexual offenses with children), the Amber Alert (a public emergency broadcast in response to the abduction of a child), and many other similar programs have emerged out of the nostalgic belief that the child is a nonlacking being and that violence against
the child thus represents the ultimate crime — the destruction of innocent wholeness.33 It is nostalgia that gives the image of the child the power that it has over us. As we bow down to this image, we avoid seeing the constitutive role that loss plays in the experience of even the
youngest child. Th rough an illusion of perspective, the child appears uncorrupted by the trauma of existence. We can believe in a complete satisfaction, which is what companies and charitable organizations off er us when they use the image of the child in their marketing campaigns. Th

. The prevalence of nostalgia has perhaps its most obvious impact in the
is image is successful as a marketing tool because it partakes in the nostalgia that defines our relation to loss

shaping of contemporary political programs. Th e entirety of the contemporary right-wing social and cultural agenda has its basis in the nostalgia
for a time of plenitude. Nostalgia fuels the demand for school prayer, the opposition to gay marriage, the eff ort to eliminate abortion, the support for the death
penalty, and so on. According to contemporary American conservatism, the abandonment of school prayer, for instance, has helped to bring about many of the
social ills (teen pregnancy, school violence, incivility, etc.) that plague contemporary American society. Champions of school prayer see the epoch when students
prayed in school as time prior to loss. At this earlierhistorical moment, subjects enjoyed a direct relation with their privileged
object and achieved a perfect satisfaction. We exist in the aftermath of a fall, and from the perspective of the fall,
we can see the possibilities for complete satisfaction in the world we have lost . Similarly, eliminating the threat of gay marriage
allows conservatives to imagine a time when marriage itself was a pure institution, a bond that permitted a direct link to one’s object. Within the nostalgia
framework that conservatism offers, loss has a place only as a limit to overcome through the return to a
nonlacking past. Conservatism cannot admit the notion of a constitutive or necessary loss. Though right-wing political activity is
unthinkable without nostalgia, emancipatory politics oft en succumbs to its power as well. Within certain forms of
environmentalism, the alternative medicine campaign, and the antiglobalization movement, we can see prominent examples of this. In each case, the left ist
political goal — protecting the environment, providing people more health options, countering global capitalism — becomes intertwined with the
idea of a return to an earlier epoch and to a less alienated way of relating to the world . Implicit in this idea is the
image of a nonlacking subjectivity, and this image stains the political goal with the tint of nostalgia . Those who argue for a
return to harmony with nature, for privileging non-Western and homeopathic forms of medicine, and for forsaking global capitalism by supporting only local
producers all take up a politics of nostalgia. The
idea that we might return to a stable relation with the natural world posits a
prior time in which this stability existed, a time lost with the onset of subjectivity . By appealing to the inherent
nostalgia of subjects, the forces of emancipation undoubtedly gain adherents . Many people drawn to the idea of “buying local”
would not otherwise find common cause with emancipatory projects, for instance. But the long-term cost of this strategy is not worth the supporters that it wins for
the emancipatory politics. Th ough conservatism doesn’t have a monopoly on nostalgia, nostalgia does have an inherently conservative structure to it. Nostalgia
is fundamentally conservative insofar as it works to obscure the gap within the social order . It posits the possibility
of an order that works without interruption and thus leaves no room for subjectivity itself . The freedom of the
subject depends on the imperfection of the social order, its inability to achieve completion or harmony . A political
philosophy that represses this failure also inherently represses the opening through which freedom emerges . In
eff ect, the nostalgic subject longs to access a past prior to its subjectivization . To retreat into nostalgia is to fl ee one’s own
freedom. In order to accomplish this and to close the gap within the social order, nostalgic projects necessarily rely on
a strong authority fi gure who promises to reinvigorate the lost past rather than on the freedom of the subject .The
emancipatory goal placed in a nostalgic appeal loses touch with the overall emancipatory project of freeing the
subject from its submission to authority fi gures. What’s more, nostalgia works only in theory, not in practice . Nostalgic
appeals always create disappointment in the last instance. We long for a time before loss, but this time only comes into existence with its loss: the birth of
subjectivity retroactively creates the object that it loses. Th
e politics of nostalgia involves never actually following through on the
nostalgic promise, as contemporary conservatism’s social politics makes evident. In contrast to their vigorous pursuit of a conservative
economic program, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (the two great proponents of a politics of nostalgia in the last fi ft y years) did not actively try to enact their
social agenda. For Reagan and Bush, the dream of a return has a political eff ectiveness that an actual return could not have . If
school prayer again became the norm in public classrooms, the nonexistence of the former wholeness would be revealed. If the threat of the gay lifestyle were
really eliminated, the banality of heterosexual marriage would once again show itself. Nostalgia remains a useful political tool only insofar as
one doesn’t effectuate it. Th is is the limit of its power.

Disruption caused by the symptom is ultimately the only source of happiness—only the
failure in obtaining the objet petit a allows for satisfaction rather than the object of desire
McGowan 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre
Typical neurotics enter into analysis believing in their dissatisfaction. They complain of a symptom — insomnia, say — that functions as a barrier to their enjoyment. They view the analyst as a subject supposed to know, that is, as a
subject who knows the secret of the symptom. Through the transmission of this knowledge, neurotics hope to overcome their symptom and become able to freely enjoy themselves without this hindrance. Th rough the duration of
a neurosis, symptoms serve as a source of satisfaction for the neurotic. Analysis emerges as a possibility only when this satisfaction becomes too troublesome, when the symptom begins to debilitate the neurotic and intrude on all
aspects of the neurotic’s life. What neurotics don’t see, however, is the satisfaction that the disruptiveness of the symptom offers. Th e goal of analysis does not consist in eliminating this disruptiveness but in changing the subject’s

Rather than seeing the disruptiveness of the symptom as the barrier to a truly satisfying life, the subject
relationship to it.

must come to grasp this disruptiveness as the source of the subject’s satisfaction . Th e relationship between psychoanalytic thought and the
symptom marks the former’s most dramatic point of rupture from forms of healing (including both other kinds of therapy and medicine). When patients come to their doctors exhibiting a symptom, doctors ideally attempt to treat
the underlying illness in order to eliminate the symptom. Th e symptom is valuable for the doctor insofar as it provides an indication of the underlying illness that can be addressed. For psychoanalytic thought, the symptom is the

Th e symptom is the disruption of the circuit that the death

indication of an underlying disorder, but at the same time it coalesces the subject’s psychic existence.

drive follows, but its disruptiveness constitutes the circuit . Without the symptom’s disruption of the circuit, there would be no drive at all; we would have a living organism
rather than a desiring subject.8 Th e symptom marks a point of excess at which the subject cannot conduct business as usual. It

emerges out of the subject’s failure to realize its desire: the subject develops a symptom — aphasia, say — in response to an
unfi lled lack, an inability to say the right thing to a love object. Th ough the failure marks the point at which the subject misses something, it becomes the point through
which the subject enjoys itself. Because there is no possibility for success in relation to the object, the subject can fi nd satisfaction only through its
specifi c mode of failure. Through the symptomatic failure, the subject relates to its lost object, and this failure is
the only possible vehicle for doing so. It is not as if the symptom is a poor substitute for a true relation to the object. The subject’s failure is its form of
success, and the trouble that the disruptiveness of the symptom gives the subject defines the subject as such. Every
subject has a fundamental symptomatic disruption that serves as the foundation for subjectivity itself.9 Th e elimination of this disruption would not produce a normal subject able to enjoy itself but would result in the annihilation

By simultaneously showing the subject that the disruption of the symptom is not the
of the subject itself (and its capacity for enjoyment).

barrier to enjoyment but the source of it and that there is no normal symptomless path to enjoyment,
psychoanalysis frees the subject to fi nd satisfaction through the subject’s symptomatic disruption rather than
continuing to view the disruption as the obstacle to the ultimate satisfaction that the subject is constantly
missing. This is not to say that psychoanalysis simply condemns the insomniac to perpetual sleeplessness that must be enjoyed rather lamented. Instead, with the aid of psychoanalysis, the obsessional who views insomnia as the barrier to a satisfying life comes to recognize the satisfaction that it actually off ers. Th e subject realizes that it will not lose the satisfaction att ached to this disruption if it falls asleep, because the disruption is constitutive of the subject’s very subjectivity. As a result, the subject can begin to enjoy while once again

gett ing to sleep. By facilitating this transformation, psychoanalysis economizes the trajectory of the death drive. A similar kind of economizing is at work in almost all of Toni Morrison’s novels, though it is especially pronounced in later works like Love.10 In this novel Morrison depicts two women who have lived together most of their adult lives despite hating each other. Christine and Heed are related through their bond with Bill Cosey, who is Christine’s grandfather and Heed’s husband, though Christine and Heed are the same age. Heed’s marriage to Bill when she was
eleven years old drove a permanent wedge between Christine and her, though they had been close friends. Aft er the marriage, each experiences the other as a symptom, as the barrier to satisfaction, an indication that she has failed to have Bill Cosey for herself. Aft er Bill’s death, the women continue to live together in his house because each provides enjoyment for the other through her role as symptom, though neither can recognize this. At the end of the novel, Christine and Heed return to an abandoned hotel that Bill owned and that they hadn’t visited for years.
While they are investigating it, Heed falls down some stairs and mortally injures herself. As she lies dying, she and Christine transform in each other’s eyes. Th ey both begin to see the other as the source of their enjoyment rather than as a barrier to it. Or they are able to see that they enjoy the barrier to the desired object rather than the desired object on the other side of the barrier. In the final moments of Heed’s life, she is able, like Sethe in Beloved, to embrace and enjoy her symptom, thereby passing through a transformation akin to the one off ered by
psychoanalysis. Finally expressing her aff ection for Christine, Heed begins to economize the path of the drive and to recognize her mode of enjoyment as her own instead of fl eeing from it. Like the individual symptom, the social symptom also appears as a barrier to enjoyment while in fact marking the very possibility of it. As many theorists have noted, for capitalist society, the fi gure of the Jew is the symptom that appears to throw the capitalist system out of balance. (Because it is a fi gure above all, any social identity can occupy the symptomatic position that the Jew
usually occupies. Th ough historically it was primarily actual Jews who were in this position, one of the great ironies of contemporary society is that the Palestinian can serve as the fi gure of the Jew, though it is most oft en the immigrant.) According to Slavoj Žižek, “Th e anti-Semitic capitalist’s hatred of the Jew [is] the hatred of the excess that pertains to capitalism itself, i.e., of the excess produced by its inherent antagonistic nature.”11 Th e excesses att ributed to the fi gure of the Jew are the excesses of the system itself, but the belief nonetheless arises that capitalism
without excess is possible. Th is belief in capitalism without excess fi nds its political expression in Fascism, which att empts to eliminate the excess embodied by the fi gure of the Jew. Fascist ideology singles out the fi gure of the Jew for its opprobrium not as a matt er of historical contingency but because this fi gure is the symptom of capitalism itself. The figure of the Jew is capitalism run amok, and Fascist ideology posits that the removal of this fi gure will restore balance to the capitalist system and make possible the coexistence of the constant innovation of capitalist
development and the stability of traditional society. Of course, the Fascist program for the elimination of the fi gure of the Jew stumbles over the inherent imbalance within capitalism. Th e successful extirpation of this fi gure doesn’t create a balanced capitalism, and the result is that the Fascist project can never succeed and can never end. Fascism cannot countenance the elimination of the fi gure that it works to eliminate. Th e enduring nature of the fi gure of the Jew — its persistence even aft er the eradication of actual Jews — testifi es to the role that this fi gure plays
in the subject’s enjoyment. Th e Fascist subject sees the fi gure of the Jew as the ultimate barrier to its own enjoyment, which creates the exigency behind the project of eliminating this fi gure. What psychoanalysis makes clear is that, as in the case of the neurotic, the Fascist actually derives enjoyment from this barrier. Rather than blocking enjoyment, the fi gure of the Jew enables it. As the symptom of capitalism, the excess point in the structure, the fi gure of the Jew embodies the enjoyment of the system itself.12 By pursuing the destruction of this fi gure, the Fascist is
actually accessing this enjoyment and taking part in it. Th e only reason that the destruction of the fi gure of the Jew provides enjoyment for Fascists is the position that this fi gure occupies as a symptom of capitalism. But like neurotics, Fascists take an indirect route to their enjoyment. Th ey are unable to see the fi gure of the Jew as the source of their enjoyment rather than as an obstacle to it. Th ey are satisfi ed subjects, but they give themselves too much trouble for their satisfaction. Freud fi nds in the neurotic not dissatisfaction but a satisfaction that comes with too
much trouble. In Seminar XI Lacan claims that this is, in fact, the driving force behind the entire psychoanalytic project: “It is this too much trouble that is the sole justifi cation of our intervention.”13 In other words, the intervention has nothing to do with alleviating dissatisfaction but with changing the way in which the analysand relates to her or his satisfaction. Neurotics come to Freud believing themselves dissatisfi ed. But this is a refl ected dissatisfaction: they are, though they usually aren’t aware of it, dissatisfi ed with their satisfaction. Th ey are seeking some other

. Th e neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of
way of arriving at it, because they fail to recognize it as satisfaction. In response, Freud att empts to produce a change in position relative to this satisfaction

desire, and psychoanalysis att empts to reveal the drive where the neurotic mistakenly sees desire . We
misrecognize satisfaction as dissatisfaction because we imagine, in our present state of lack, that we once had a
completeness that we have now lost. Th at is to say, we believe that our privileged object once had a substantial existence and fail to see that it became a privileged object through the very act
of being lost. Th is misrecognition allows us to continue to believe in a previous and possible future completeness . Th ough it is

neurotic, this misrecognition is inherent in the very nature of desire, and it is through this fundamental misrecognition

that desire fi rst begins and later sustains itself . Desire constantly seeks out the object that would satisfy it, but this object always eludes it — or, to be more precise, desire
eludes the object, keeping desire perpetual (and perpetually dissatisfi ed). Desire, in other words, doesn’t att empt to
achieve satisfaction but to sustain itself as desire, to keep desire going . Th is is why desire constantly seeks out a
satisfying object and yet never quite gets it. It leads us to see ourselves as dissatisfied and to fail to see the satisfaction we obtain from the circulation of the drive. Desire is
nothing but a misrecognition of the death drive .14

LUNDBERG 2012 (Chris, comm studies prof at UNC, Lacan in Public)

Paradoxically, these two facets of human life are intensely complementary. The failure of unicity
necessitates imagined unicity to purchase the coherence of a subject’s reality. Alternately, imagined
unicities are the precondition for recognizing the failure of unicity, because unicity’s failure only
becomes apparent when the hard facts of the Real run up against our fantasies. Subjects and their
discourses emerge at this nexus of failed and feigned unicity through rhetorical artifice, via the act of
imagining and performing localized, contingent unicities in response to unicity’s failure. Thus, Lacan’s
psychoanalysis “reads all speech” and, by extension, the discourses that constitute a subject “as a
compromise formation.”8 Failures of unicity in speech, subject, and the sign are put to work as forces
that call forth our investment in the supplements, fantasies, and imagined totalities that work to cover
over failed unicity: instead of becoming fatal in the life of speech and the speaking subject, failures in
unicity become the driving forces that animate human existence.

Thus, a provisional definition of rhetoric as a compromise formation: rhetoric is both signifying in a

condition of failed unicity and a way of feigning unicity in the context of failed unicity. Failed unicity
means, for example, that despite a subject’s expectation that the social world should function as a
coherent whole, this condition does not inhere in its experiences of the interhuman world. Similarly,
despite the subject’s presumption of an essential complementarity between language and the world,
there is no automatic correspondence between signifiers, representations, and the objects to which
they refer or between signifiers and that which they attempt to capture. Feigned unicity means that
discourse is a contingently situated act of labor connecting signifiers and representations with their
referents and providing the illusion of communion between subjects and their others. Feigned unicity
between signs, representations, and their referents purchases the subject an ability to act as if words
and representations effortlessly stand in for their referents. Feigned unicity also imagines a unified
social field, despite the subject’s experience of a fragmented social world. Failed unicity invites feigned
unicity in the form of artificial practices that bind signifiers together, habitually repeat the
presumption of the signifier’s correspondence with the world external to it, and render signifiers
communicable. Rhetorical artifice—tropes, modes of address, imaginary commitments, and the labor of
investment— underwrites these practices, feigning unicity in the context of its failure. Rhetoric affords
Lacan’s psychoanalysis an account of the means by which feigned unicity underwrites the speaking
subject, the idea of a shared communicative relationship and correspondence between discourse and
the world. Simultaneously, Lacan’s theory of rhetoric marks the fact that unicity fails because there is
a world of things, forces, and relations that lie beyond the limits of rhetoric’s ability to encode or
capture them without remainder. If there is no ultimate point of unicity—if there is no transparent
reciprocal intersubjective bond that unites subjects in communication and no natural correspondence
between signs and the world—there are at least tropes and practices of investment that sustain subjects
and their discourses.

Links 1. The aff’s attempts to universalize it’s advocacy/ethics beyond this room is a
coping mechanism with their loss of a perscriptive grammar. The aff is limited by their
rhetoric in this room, which fails to establish a universal norm, a grammar, of ethics
and action. 2. Their appeals to violence occurring “in the present/squo” fails to
understand the present does not exist, hypercharged by the fact that we are IN A
DEBATE ROUND, in which we are reading evidence written in the past.
Felman 03 Writing and Madness: (literature/philosophy/psychoanalysis) By Shoshana Felman Shoshana Felman is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her books include Literature and Psychoanalysis, Testimony, and
(most recently) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Her The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, is being reissued in a new edition by Stanford University Press, with a Foreword by Stanley Cavell and
an Afterword by Judith Butler. ZD

This radical dimension of loss is, therefore, nothing other than the loss of the security of a
metalanguage, the loss of a "claim to a position of exhaustiveness" which would precisely be the claim
of grammar: we are faced, once again, with the inescapable dimen-sion of rhetoric, that "stumbling
block" which forces discourse to discover that it can only define rhetoric rhetorically, by participat-ing
in it, i.e., by stumbling, by elaborating not a grammar of rhet-oric but a rhetoric of rhetoric: "Stumbling,
faltering, splitting. In a spoken or written sentence something slips C. . 4. It's there that something else is
asking to be realized—something which appears as intentional, of course, but partaking of a strange
temporality. "33 This "strange temporality" is the lack of a present, the non self-presence characteristic
of the rhetorical mode. It is also in this sense that the rhetoric of desire and enthusiasm is bound to be
dated: for this rhetoric is not contemporaneous with its own state-ment. "There is no present," writes
Mallamie, "no—a present does not exist. (...l Ill-informed is he who would proclaim himself his own
contemnorary."34

Felman 03 Writing and Madness: (literature/philosophy/psychoanalysis) By Shoshana Felman Shoshana Felman is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her books include Literature and Psychoanalysis, Testimony, and
(most recently) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Her The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, is being reissued in a new edition by Stanford University Press, with a Foreword by Stanley Cavell and
an Afterword by Judith Butler.ZD

What, however, is a grammar (a formalized grammar) if not the epitome of metalanguage? Grammar is
thus—and Lacan knows it—one more impossible desire: the desire to establish a norm, a rule of
correctness, to avoid precisely the misprision inher-ent in the enterprise, to be for once a non-dupe. But
who knows better than Lacan that "non-dupes err"?24 Lacan's writing thus articulates the very torment
which inhabits logic. And the chances taken by Lacan's text—what gives it a chance and what makes its
chance ours—is the spark struck up in language by the inner ten-sion of a discourse struggling with
itself, struggling with its dou-ble, contradictory desire: the desire for grammar and its counter-part,
the desire for rhetoric. It is precisely through this contradic-tion that Lacan's discourse rejoins the
Real: "the real," says Lacan, "is the impossible."
Psychoanalysis is based specifically on the irrational actions of leaders. Absent the
alt’s analysis, policymakers will always shift their failed desire onto an external
scapegoat, ensuring dangerous interventions.
Jacobsen ‘13 --- University of Chicago (Kurt, “Why Freud matters: Psychoanalysis and international
relations revisited”, International Relations, SagePub)
That interest is long gone, except for a minor and embattled presence in the sub-field of political psychology. Even there, little has changed in three decades since a
volume entitled Psychological Models in International Politics appeared, devoid of a single reference to psychoanalysis.2 Freud, as Paul Roazen lamented long ago,
‘has remained throughout political science something of a spook’.3 Roazen referred to American political science. Critics of this summation combed political science
to cite at best a few marginal forays (usually British or Commonwealth in origin) into psychoanalysis, which is of interest only insofar as a particular analyst thereby
buttresses his or her paradigmatic preferences in constructivism or poststructural discourse analysis.4 A major methodological objection to psychoanalysis is that an
investigative means devised for individuals is inadvisable to apply to collective entities. States cannot possess egos, ids, or superegos – although a case has been
made by Zizek, and Erich Fromm long before him, for the palpable influence of an ‘institutional unconscious’.5 Freud was alert to the perils of overstepping domains
when he pondered whether civilizations could be neurotic.6 Psychoanalysts, an eminent analyst cautions, are: uniquely qualified to understand, analyze and assist
the patient on the couch, but as soon as they move away from this personal confrontation (or the modification of a small group) to comment on matters outside
their training and experience, the value of their comments would appear to depend on their knowledge and wisdom, not on their qualification.7 While some

scholars draw upon cognitive frameworks to analyze otherwise overlooked political phenomena, psychoanalysis remains firmly on
the fringes of IR where Lacanian discourse analysts treat us to such illuminating sentences as, ‘It then endeavors, via constructing fantasies, to use
transitive discourse objects to sustain the desire for the constructed dichotomies, which hankers for discursive closure’.8 Psychoanalysis, contrary to his proponents,

Few scholars deny that psychological factors exert a significant

neither begins nor ends with Lacan.

effect upon politics. Hans Morgenthau wrote that international politics was primarily psychological in character, and that the personal
inclinations and oddities of leaders can at crucial times matter a great deal.9 If anarchy is ‘what
we make of it’ (and the rise of Athenian power created anxiety in Sparta), then it pays to ask who we are in our inner worlds as well as in our outer guises when we
make something out of whatever we behold.10 At what point in an explanation do psychological factors – from personal quirks to group dynamics to mass
perceptions – become important? From the very beginning of our lives, is the psychoanalytic answer. Indeed, psychoanalysis aims to change where the beginning is

psychoanalysis
reckoned to begin in any explanatory probe. In the 1930s, radical analyst Wilhelm Reich was really rather moderate when arguing that

had a role in explaining why actors pursue what to the external observer are
irrational, blinkered, and self-injurious actions.11 Reich’s intent was not only to explain ‘deviations from rationality’ but to
inquire into the adequacy of our notion of rationality, especially as this seductive and problematic concept is buffeted by changing contexts and personal

interests.12Misperception is a widely accepted phenomenon in IR now, as is the imputed sway in decision-

making circles of analogical reasoning, such as the domino theory .13 But important differences exist between Freud’s depth psychology and,

to use shorthand for a bundle of related practices, ‘cognitive psychology’.14 The purpose of psychoanalysis is to pry into our
unconscious drives and defenses to illuminate their influence over the motives and behavior of the beholder
as well as the beheld.15 Cognitive psychology, unlike psychoanalysis, usually exempts practitioners from being prey to their own forms of unexamined irrationality,

psychoanalysis, beyond
which may be one reason for its relative toleration in the field. This essay reconsiders, long after Lasswell’s heyday, whether

discourse analysis, can be a useful interpretive approach in international politics . What is the significance in
human behavior of the unconscious, that is, of motives and forces of which we are largely unaware?16 (Extremely significant, Freud says, because unconscious
forces, if unexposed, tend to make our decisions for us.) The first section examines Freudian analysis and its uneasy relation to political analysis.Zizthen examine key
issues raised by psychoanalysis regarding the efficacy of IR models, the concept of selfinterest, and the waging of war. Finally, to appraise the ‘value added’ of this
approach,Zizexamine psychoanalytic understandings of intervention in Vietnam and, more briefly, the ‘war on terror’. The argument is that psychoanalytically
attuned approaches yield important insights into the wielding of power. Psychoanalytic
triggers Psychoanalysts regard human
emotional life as a continuum in which we share every feeling and impulse to some degree, and indulge
or capitulate to them if the combination of internal and external conditions is right. Violent emotions are
universal, as much so as love, though they usually are channeled in muted ways that avert harm in
everyday life. One is only tempted to summon the psychoanalyst when excesses form a profoundly
damaging pattern. The same rule of thumb goes for bringing psychoanalytic perspectives, or
psychological predilections of leaders, to the fore in inquiries: Do so when behavior is very much out of
keeping with observable circumstances. Freud, while shying away from direct applications to politics,
always intended that psychoanalysis contribute to the social sciences and even to public health.17 At
minimum, such exploratory expeditions demand considerable knowledge both of psychoanalysis and of
the social scientific field into which one introduces analytic concepts. One may well ask whether we
need to know what, for example, the youthful years of leaders have to do with their professional lives.
Their actions surely are overdetermined.18 Methodological humility, a rare enough trait anywhere, is
called for. In 1965, after the long-distance ‘analysis’ of candidate Barry Goldwater, the American
Psychiatric Association president rebuked those who diagnosed political personalities from afar.19
Psychological reductionism is a tempting pitfall, though anyone trained in political science, with its
overvaluation of quantitative methods and formal theory, is unlikely to stumble into it.20 One thereby
would underestimate familiar tangible forces that shape political decisions. Still, seasoned scholars
cannot credibly deny that international politics is at best only partly a rational enterprise. If so, IR is a
valid arena for psychoanalytic inquiry. What some players within IR deem rational – ‘thinking
about the unthinkable’, ‘brinksmanship’, or ‘winning hearts and minds’ through supposedly selective
violence – will appear irrational to beholders who apply different standards. ‘You can’t be too
careful’ is a bromide that counterproductively spurs dangerous imbroglios, such as the security
dilemma.21 Rationality often is what we choose to make of it, under institutional pressure, disciplinary
habits, and unexamined personal traits. Mercer notes how rational choice notions, supposedly stripped
of emotion, consistently lead to distorted depictions of human action, although this insight harks back
half a century or more in Freudian annals.22 Consider too Mannheim’s classic distinction where what is
functionally rational is not always substantively rational.23 Ellul captured this significant divide acutely
when he defined technology as the application of increasingly refined means to ever more carelessly
considered ends.24 Rationality is conceived as rationalization, a defense mechanism cloaking other
motives, which may or may not be conscious. Psychoanalysis is applied not only to the leadership but
also to relations between elites and the citizenry. Rose notes that actors must be understood not only in
terms of their material interests and institutional constraints but also in terms of their images (of reality)
and identifications.25 This venerable formulation sets up interestingly porous dichotomies between
inside and outside (private and public), and between the social and psychic. A lack of personality and
group psychology studies only deprives us of useful ways to burrow into the ‘agentic’, which is, after all,
where the ‘mutual constitution’ of agency and structure that constructivists are so concerned about
occurs. As for realists, the political murderers in a Brecht play apologize to their victim: ‘Sorry – force of
circumstance’ – a sentiment realists readily understand. But one trouble with halting inquiry here is that
Freud demonstrated how often, to quell a conscience or to fool an outsider, we attribute to
circumstances what are our own impulsions. ‘ A common psychodynamic mechanism is to
convert desire so that it appears an external necessity’ , Bakan explains, ‘It is thus an open
question in each instance whether what appears to be external necessity really is that, or simply a facet
concealing some internal pressure’.26 Hence, even when interests seem to do the trick in explaining
behavior, actors may resort to pleasing or exculpating rationales to justify callous aims .
Acknowledging this slippery fact of political life is useful to understanding and even anticipating what
actors do. The story that the US elites invaded Iraq because they feared a weapon of mass destruction
(WMD) threat does not play well anymore despite interesting but tenuous defenses.27 If key actors say
they were misled by faulty intelligence, which they had a strong hand in purveying, then one is well
advised to look elsewhere for explanation. Typically, we can come up with a plausible answer based on
material interests such as oil (ridiculed in mainstream circles at the time). Typically too, there are
‘multiple equilibria’ in policy choice. Why did these leaders select this course of action when force of
circumstances was not determinative? Why impute credence to what is ‘in actors’ heads’ when
imputation of material factors or structural forces can do the job? The reason is that although social
structural forces operate apart from individual human agency, they remain dependent on the
character of human beings to carry them out. ‘It is precisely at this juncture that Freudian theory
proves so suggestive’, Lichtman argued, ‘For the conjunction of individual intentions and social
structures is embedded dialectically in the alienated institutions of social life and in the repressed
unconscious of specific social agents’.28 How does this apply in IR?
 Butler

Butler’s theory of performativity reproduces the subject of philosophy

CAMPBELL 2001 (Kirsten, dept of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, “The Plague
of the Subject: Psychoanalysis and Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power,” International Journal of
Sexuality and Gender Studies, Vol. 6, Nos. 1/2)

the Hegelian model of the

Lacan (1977) argues that fully conscious self” produces a subject that is founded in “being conscious of self, the

the conscious and secured by consciousness Because this subject takes up a defensive position (p. 296).

against its unconscious other, it cannot know itself in its refusal of the unconscious . In that position, the subject projects consciousness and self

That unity of identity enables the subject to claim mastery and presence of self
as a unified identity. . In this position, the subject is substantiated as a

This is a subject in the traditional philosophical sense

conscious self that is transparent, certain, and foundational. of a conscious self. Lacan (1991) argues that the subject founds philosophical

philosophy founds its knowing upon a conscious self

discourse. In his later work, L’envers de la psychanalyse, Lacan (1991) contends that , an “I” that believes that what it perceives of itself

that can master itself

represents its true self, that it can know itself and, hence, philosophy is a
it (p. 71). Philosophical knowledge continually reproduces this transcendental and illusory conscious self (p. 70). For Lacan,

discourse of mastery .

In Subjects of Desire, Butler (1987) considers the implications of Lacan’s critique of Hegelian philosophy. She briefly, but suggestively, discusses the implications of Lacan’s critique of Hegel for philosophical thinking. Butler argues that:

Inasmuch as philosophy savours the postulation of a self-adequate subject, philosophical

discourse purports to say all that it means, and never to mean more than it actually says.

The psychoanalytic deconstruction of philosophy would, then, consist in listening to the lacks and gaps in philosophical discourse, and theorising on that basis what kind of defence against desire the philosophical project seems to be (1987, pp. 196–197). Considered in these terms,

Butler’s theory of the subject reproduces philosophical discourse in The Psychic Life of Power . It postulates the self-adequate subject of philosophy, a conscious self that is

Her theory continually performs this subject, reiterating this transcendental and illusory
transparent, certain, and foundational.

conscious self of identity , this repeats the philosophical

. If that theory is read symptomatically philosophical discourse of the conscious subject repudiates the unconscious. It

defence against its unconscious other. Butler’s missed encounter with the psychoanalytic unconscious
traps her theory of the subject within the philosophical discourse of the conscious self . The fundamental psychoanalytic distinction

Psychic Life continually

between the conscious and the unconscious reveals “reason’s inability to come outside of itself, to enclose and know itself from the outside: the inadequation of the subject and its other” (Grosz, 1993, p. 189).

repeats, and is haunted by, the impossible task of understanding the fully conscious self.” The “being conscious of self, the

aporia of the unconscious in Butler’s theory of the subject prevents her from theorising the psychic life
of power .

Psychic Life articulates an extremely important political and theoretical problematic for contemporary theory. Politically, it provides a critical account of the formation of identity in power. Theoretically, it deploys both Foucault and Freud to produce this critical account, opening the

her failure to undertake a psychoanalytic discourse

possibility of a powerful intersection of Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theory. Butler’s repetition of philosophical discourse, and , however,

prevents her from developing this theoretical and political project. Instead, like the return of the important

repressed, that project continually suffers the plague of the (repressed) unconscious. In order to
understand the psychic life of power, it is necessary to reconsider the problematic relationship between the political subject of Foucault and the

unconscious subject of Freud.

 Nuclear war
Nuclear War rhetoric leads to psychic numbing.
(There is a better tag for this)

Chernus 91 Ira, “Nuclear Madness: Religion and the Psychology of the Nuclear Age”,
https://books.google.com/books?id=P5ZadFGmKq0C&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=Nuclear+Madness:
+Religion+and+the+Psychology+of+the+Nuclear+Age&source=bl&ots=w4uQtfU365&sig=ACfU3U0P3sG4
sqvLdHui2uA5PQI9WAUzLQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwimxNup8aDjAhUGTN8KHVQEANAQ6AEwBnoE
CAsQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

The dilemma can no longer be attributed to a paucity of public knowledge and debate.Nor can it simply
be charged to widespread immorality. Most Americans proclaim their love for their land, their children,
and themselves unashamedly. For some this love leads to antinuclear sentiments, for others it leads to a
pronuclear stance. But there is little reason to doubt that love is just as genuine in either case. Perhaps
that is why moral appeals are no more successful than intellectual appeals in removing the nuclear
threat. It is hard for us to see what other approach might be available, though, because the two tracks of
antinuclear activism are the two tracks laid down for all moral problem solving in the foundations of
Western culture. The first rests on the premise of classical Greek thought (and its Enlightenment revival)
that evil stems from ignorance, that those who know the right will inevitably do the right. The second
rests on the biblical premise that evil stems from a misguided or perverted will. In the present case,
however, it seems that those who are committed to nuclear abolition do need a new diagnosis of the
problem. Some disarmament advocates already entertain a third approach. They focus not on problems
of thinking or willing but of feeling, or in more general terms on psychological problems. Probably the
best known psychological diagnosis is summed up in Robert Jay Lifton’s term psychic numbing.
According to this view the essential problem lies not in the way we think or choose but in our failure to
think and choose at all, and this is essentially a failure of imagination – a lack of images of the threat .
Psychic numbing is a very real phenomenon, and a psychological perspective offers fruitful new
approaches to the nuclear dilemma. But it seems to me that the crucial problem is not an absence of
images but rather the kind of images we use to think about the nuclear issue. Somehow these images
must promote psychic numbing. If so, then it matters little whether we think about the Bomb or not. In
either case, we will remain numb and unable to make meaningful changes in the status quo. This book
therefore takes Lifton’s theoretical model as its starting point and builds upon it, developing a broader
model as its starting point and builds upon it, developing a broader model that can account for both the
proliferation of nuclear imagery and the persistence of psychic numbing. Lifton suggests that psychic
numbing must be understood as in some sense a religious problem. My own previous research suggests
that most of our nuclear images have striking analogues in traditional religious images. So it seems
especially fruitful to probe the problem from the perspective of the psychology of religion. My approach
to the problem begins with two theorists of psychology and religion who have influence Lifton’s own
though – R.D. Laing and Paul Tillich. The first three chapters apply their thought to the psychodynamics
of the Cold War and the superpowers’ arms race. Since the Cold War remains with discourse, and as an
ever-present possibility for the future, I speak of it in the present tense.
Nuclear Rhetoric prevents meaningful scenario planning - The discussion itself is the
nuclear annihilation. Psychic numbing leads to the false sense of securitization
Chernus 91 Ira, “Nuclear Madness: Religion and the Psychology of the Nuclear Age”,
https://books.google.com/books?id=P5ZadFGmKq0C&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=Nuclear+Madness:
+Religion+and+the+Psychology+of+the+Nuclear+Age&source=bl&ots=w4uQtfU365&sig=ACfU3U0P3sG4
sqvLdHui2uA5PQI9WAUzLQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwimxNup8aDjAhUGTN8KHVQEANAQ6AEwBnoE
CAsQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

The prerequisite for relative balance is what Lifton calls “grounding ”. The self must be grounded in a
sense of itself as a biological and historical unity, an ongoing integrated vital organism. This grounding
depends, in turn, on a basic trust in life itself as a dependable balance of structure and change in which
the self is permanently embedded, and which will continue beyond every individual’s death. The
prerequisite for basic trust is an image-constellation or form that can symbolize both the death of the
individual and the survival of the individual’s meaning through biological, spiritual, cultural, or natural
continuity. This is what Lifton calls “symbolic immortality.” When there is no adequate form of symbolic
immortality, the result is psychic numbing. Through Lifton’s many discussions of psychic numbing view it
from varying perspectives, they all point toward a basic (though often implicit) theory of the
phenomenon rooted in his larger paradigm. According to this theory, a massive death encounter calls
into question every form of symbolic immortality; it raises the possibility that the stream of life as a
whole may come to an end. Therefor it undercuts the grounding of the self. For the ungrounded self,
every experience of psychological change evokes the threat of death for two reasons. Without
assurance of life continuity, the self fears that the decentering caused by changing forms and images
may be permanent. Since the decentered self has no stable patterns for filtering stimuli, permanent
decentering means a threat of being annihilated by overwhelming stimuli. At the same time the
decentered self also fears that it may search for new imagery corresponding to the new stimuli but fail
to find any, leaving it bereft of all stimuli and all interactions with the world. When symbolic
immortality is undermined, therefore, the self feels the threat of annihilation from every new stimulus
that calls for new inner imagery. This fear of annihilation, both from too few and too many stimuli, can
lead the self to refuse to seek new images at all. When the formative process thus shuts itself down, the
result is psychic numbing or death in life. This is what has happened to all of us, Lifton contends, under
the threat of nuclear annihilation. We are simply too petrified to accept, or even seek, adequate images
of the Bomb and its effects.
 Security
Psychoanalysis is ontologically tied to the ongoing quest for security – The self will
always attempt to tie itself towards its false sense of protection
Chernus 91 Ira, “Nuclear Madness: Religion and the Psychology of the Nuclear Age”,
https://books.google.com/books?id=P5ZadFGmKq0C&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=Nuclear+Madness:
+Religion+and+the+Psychology+of+the+Nuclear+Age&source=bl&ots=w4uQtfU365&sig=ACfU3U0P3sG4
sqvLdHui2uA5PQI9WAUzLQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwimxNup8aDjAhUGTN8KHVQEANAQ6AEwBnoE
CAsQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Tillich, Laing, and Hillman in a comprehensive theoretical model for interpreting the nuclear age. Laing
and Tillich agree that the ultimate concern of every human life is the quest for ontological security. So a
psychology that enters the domain of ultimate concern must become an ontological psychology. In
ontological terms the self’s quest for vitality is its quest for ontological security; to feel really alive is to
feel genuinely real. Since each of the psyche’s two impulses has a limited reality and each is in conflict
with the other, the self must feel less than fully real. But the self can feel secure in its reality as long as it
feels that the formative process is free to follow its innate path toward religious imagery. Ontological
security thus depends on experiencing the endless freedom of the image-making process, which is our
won most genuine reality, or what Laing calls the true self: “our personal idiom of experiencing…
imagination, dreams, fantasy, and beyond that to ever further reaches of experience.” So security
requires that imagination be grounded in religious image, which can give form to the possibility of pure
formlessness. The self must be able to look into pure possibility, which portends the abyss of unreality,
within an immutably real structure and see pure possibility as the promise of perfect reality (even if that
promise reamains an unrealized ideal). When there is no grounding in a religious image, the formative
process seems unable to continue its innate path toward religious imagery. The psyche feels trapped in
its limited reality. Yet, since it has no form for the prospect of formlessness, the pure possibility of that
prospect can be experienced only as the threat of imminent unreality. This is the state that Laing calls
ontological insecurity. Psychic numbing must be understood in ontological terms as a response to this
crisis. Psychic numbing displays the same psychodynamics described by Laing as the ‘schizoid strategy’
and by Tillich as ‘neurosis.’ In fact the schizoid strategy can best be understood as a particular
manifestation (or perhaps a more precise description) of what Tillich calls neurosis. The schizoid
fantasies that Laing discovered parallel the neurotic’s nightmare images described by Tillich.
 Cap
Getting swept off our feet by our fantasies ends with a harsh encounter that politics
cannot be controlled by us
Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis Stavrakakis has PhD degrees from the ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’
programme at the University of Essex, “Lacan and the Political”, p.64, 10/3/99)

symbolisation has the creative power to produce

The field of social construction and political reality is the field in which the symbolisation of this real is attempted. Chaitin is correct when asserting that

cultural identities, but at the cost of covering over the fundamental nothingness that forms its
a price,

foundation it is culture, not nature, that abhors a vacuum, above all that of its own contingency (Chaitin, 1996:4- 5),

of its ultimate inability to master and symbolise the impossible real: there is a structural lack in the
symbolic, which means that certain points of the real canít be symbolised in a definite manner The .

unmitigated real provokes anxiety, and this in turn gives rise to never-ending, defensive, imaginary
constructs all human productions [Society itself, culture, religion, science can be
(Verhaeghe, 1994:60). Following from this,

understood in the light of that structural failure of the symbolic in relationship to the real It is the (ibid.: 61).

moment of this failure, the moment of our encounter with the real, that is revealed as the moment of
the political par excellence It is the constitutivity of this moment in Lacanian psychoanalysis that
in our reading of Lacan.

proves our fantasmatic conception of the socio-political institution of society as a harmonious totality to
be no more than a mirage. It is this traumatic moment of the political qua encounter with the real that
initiates again and again a process of symbolisation, and initiates the ever-present hegemonic play
between different symbolisations of this real. This play leads to the emergence of politics, to the political
institution of a new social fantasy (or of many antagonistic fantasies engaged in a struggle for
hegemony) in the place of the dislocated one, and so on and so forth. In this light, Lacan’s insistence on the centrality of the real, especially in the latter part of his teaching, acquires major political
importance. Lacan himself, in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis uses noise and accident as metaphors or examples of our encounter with the real. It might be possible to add the political to this chain of equivalences. Lacan’s schema of socio-political life is
that of a play, an unending circular play between possibility and impossibility, between construction and destruction, representation and failure, articulation and dislocation, reality and the real, politics and the political.

Capitalism functions on empty promises of new commodities that will bring satisfaction to
the people—the AFF only plays into this illusion and ultimately fails.
McGowan 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

Capitalist ideology aims at producing subjects who experience their existence as dissatisfied and simultaneously
invest themselves completely in the ideal of happiness or complete satisfaction .15 Th is idea manifests itself not just in
the everyday workings of capitalism but in its most serious theorists — from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. According to Adam Smith, society can attain
the satisfaction of true prosperity as long as it unleashes humanity’s natural propensity for accumulation. He writes: “Th e natural eff ort of every individual to bett er his own condition, when suff ered to exert itself with freedom

Th e
and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions.”16

desire to accumulate enables capitalist subjects to overcome barriers and obtain happiness. For Smith and others, there is no question of
an insurmountable barrier and no possibility of enjoying the barrier itself. Capitalism survives on the basis of the same misrecognition that plagues Freud’s neurotic: the

mistaking of desire for drive, the inability to see satisfaction in the act of not getting the object . Without engendering this collective
misrecognition, capitalism could not sustain itself as capitalism. Capitalist subjects structurally fail to see their own inherent self-satisfaction, and it

is this failure that keeps them going as capitalist subjects. Freud’s thought reveals this, and it reveals that there is a beyond of the capitalist subject — a beyond that is the
death drive. Th e emancipatory politics of psychoanalysis is thus inherently anticapitalist insofar as the functioning of

capitalism depends on the idea of obtaining the object . Capitalism feeds off of desire’s perpetual dissatisfaction .
Th is dissatisfaction leads to eff orts to accumulate more capital, att empts to increase productivity , and the
introduction of new commodities into the market — in short, every aspect of capitalist economics. Marketers in capitalist society are bent
upon producing desire in subjects and blinding them to the drive . In the Grundrisse Marx describes the way capitalism perpetuates
desire through the production of needs: “Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a
need for the material. . . . The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it . Th e object
of art — like every other product — creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”17 Capitalism functions by sustaining —

Capitalism constantly seeks out and embraces

and even increasing — a sense of dissatisfaction commensurate with desire. Th is explains capitalism’s infatuation with the new.

what is new, because the new keeps desire going by helping to create a sense of lack . Th e new holds the promise
of a future enjoyment that will surpass whatever the subject has experienced before . Th is promise is the engine behind capitalism’s creation of ever more needs. Th e more represents a constant lure, the next more — at least from afar

— always seems to be it, the object that would provide the elusive enjoyment. A portrayal of the inherent dissatisfaction that capitalism requires even among the wealthy occurs near the end of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). In the fi lm’s penultimate scene, Jake Gitt es ( Jack Nicholson) reproaches Noah Cross ( John Huston) for continuing a pattern of ruthless accumulation despite having already obtained a vast fortune. Th eir conversation makes clear the insatiable nature of the imperative to accumulate. Jake asks, “How much are you worth?” Cross, sensing the

possibility of buying Jake off , says, “I have no idea. How much do you want?” But Jake doesn’t want money; he wants to know what keeps Cross going. Jake continues, “No, I just want to know what you’re worth. Over ten million?” Cross responds, “Oh my, yes.” Th en Jake asks, “Why are you doing it? How much bett er can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already aff ord?” Cross gives an answer emblematic of the capitalist subject: “Th e future, Mr. Getz [sic], the future.” Cross’s appeal to the “future” indicates that he believes in the
promise of capitalism — that the future holds the lost enjoyment that always eludes us today . Despite his millions, his emphasis on the
future demonstrates that Cross cannot recognize his own inherent satisfaction.18 Capitalism leaves individual subjects with a constant sense of their own

dissatisfaction, but it also holds out the lure of future enjoyment, which prompts both the capitalist to create a new
commodity and the consumer to buy it. Just as the capitalist hopes that every newly created commodity will be it, so does the consumer. However, no new commodity
can ever provide the lost enjoyment for either the capitalist or the consumer, no matt er how successful the
commodity is, because the enjoyment has only an imaginary status . Once the commodity is realized for each (put on
the market, in the case of the capitalist, or purchased, in the case of the consumer), it necessarily loses its enjoyment value . In this sense, capitalism depends upon the dynamic of the child at
Christmas time. On Christmas Eve all the presents under the tree off er the promise of a future enjoyment, but by aft ernoon on Christmas Day the child ends up bored and desiring once again, not having found the elusive
enjoyment in any of the opened packages. Th is boredom isn’t just the sign of the child’s narcissism or that it has been spoiled by overindulgent parents; it is, rather, a structural necessity within the desiring world of capitalism.

Th e cycle of the promise of future enjoyment and then the inevitable dissatisfaction that follows can only
perpetuate itself as long as capitalist subjects continue to hope, that is, to believe in the promise that the new
commodity holds out. More than anything else, hope keeps capitalism going. Giving up hope — and yet continuing on, enjoying continuing on — moves us
from desire to the drive. Th is type of transformation also entails the end of the capitalist subject: capitalist subjects without hope are no longer
capitalist subjects.

Capitalist subject endlessly accumulate in order to try to fill the lack created by the formation
subjectivity—nothing will ever fill that lack.
[Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

What holds us back from this possibility is our inability to discover a way of fi nding satisfaction satisfying . Th is failure,
perhaps even more than its human costs, is what most disturbs Marx about capitalism. Th e points in Th e Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts at which Marx seems to slip into humanism as he recounts the eff ects of capitalism

are the points at which he tries to articulate, though he wouldn’t put it this way, the capitalist system’s resistance to the death drive: capitalism doesn’t allow us to find
satisfaction in our satisfaction. Its logic is one that Marx calls “self-renunciation.” As he puts it in perhaps the most famous passage from the Manuscripts, “The less you eat, drink and buy books;
the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save — the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour — your
capital. Th e less you are, the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life, the more you have, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”19 What Marx describes here as “alienated life” is not a life made

The alternative is not, as Marx seems to imply, an immediate satisfaction involved with
unnatural by capitalism but a life where satisfaction is not satisfying, a life stuck within the capitalist logic of desire.

eating, drinking, and buying books; rather, it is the ability to achieve a mediated satisfaction , becoming satisfi ed with the

satisfaction that is already ours. The key, in other words, is not what we do so much as how we do it. It is on the level of this “how,” rather than a “what,” that capitalism alienates its subjects
from their satisfaction. It fosters this type of alienation through its unrelenting demand for accumulation . Accumulation is the superegoic imperative

apropos of capitalism. Th at is, within capitalism, accumulation has the status of a moral obligation, and the capitalist subject

inevitably hears an internal voice urging her or him on for “more.” In the fi rst volume of Capital, Marx captures perfectly the superegoic dimension of
capitalism’s command for accumulation. Th e voice proclaims, “Accumulate, accumulate! Th at is Moses and the prophets!”20 Here, Marx reveals the way in which the call for accumulation functions as law and formally as a

no amount of accumulation is ever enough,

command. Despite whatever eff orts we might make at obedience, we can never quiet this voice or sate the superego’s appetite:

either for the individual capitalist subject or for the capitalist society on the whole . Th e debt to the superego, in other words, is infi
nite. Th e more we accumulate, the more we see there is for us to accumulate.21 Once we surrender to the demand for accumulation, we only get sucked further and further in by it. Th e fundamental project of capitalist ideology
involves identifying accumulation with enjoyment. Th is is why the capitalist subject can understand, if not identify with, the actions of the character Trina in Frank Norris’s naturalist novel McTeague. In the most memorable scene
of the novel, Trina goes to bed with the gold she has hoarded and derives an intensely sexual pleasure from this experience. Norris writes: “One evening she had even spread all the gold pieces between the sheets, and had then
gone to bed, stripping herself, and had slept all night upon the money, taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth fl at pieces the length of her entire body.”22 Th ough Norris presents this sexual encounter
between Trina and her gold as a perversion, it nonetheless resonates strongly and seems true to most readers because of the seemingly natural link between accumulation and enjoyment. Th e sexual nature of the gold in this
scene stems from its ability to package and contain an enjoyment that would otherwise remain ungraspable. Most of us do not have sex with gold or other monetary forms. But we do accept the link between accumulation and

apotheosis of accumulation manifests itself in purchasing

enjoyment that leads to the actions of a character like Trina. Most oft en, the

commodities that seem to embody future enjoyment. One buys the newest clothes, the trendiest music, or the latest technological gadget in order to access the
enjoyment that these commodities promise. But under the sway of capitalist ideology this att itude extends even to relationships: one chooses friends, albeit unconsciously, who will advance one’s own social status, and one hopes
to fi nd a romantic partner who will do the same. Th e most private forms of enjoyment in capitalist society have their basis in the idea of accumulation and are unthinkable outside of it. It follows from this that the primary line of

capitalist
social critique launched against capitalist society would focus on society’s failure to live up to its ideology. It is a truism of Marxist analysis — especially aft er the Frankfurt School — to suggest that

ideology uses the image of successful accumulation in order to hide the lack of accumulation that most
subjects endure and thereby produce docility . According to this position, images of enjoyment, such as Hollywood fi lms, create a false or illusory pleasure that helps to satisfy
otherwise dissatisfi ed subjects. While entranced by the romantic bond between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or between Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman, capitalist subjects do not think about their position within

the capitalist order of things. Th ese subjects invest themselves in the image of enjoyment rather than in the real thing. Th
is is why Th eodor Adorno claims that “all mass culture is fundamentally adaptation.”23 Th e promulgation of the image of enjoyment, for Adorno and the Frankfurt School, becomes capitalist ideology’s way of creating subjects
who believe that they are enjoying themselves while existing within the intractable dissatisfaction of capitalism. In the face of capitalist ideology’s proliferation of such images, the task for the critical thinker becomes one of tearing
them apart, exposing the lack of enjoyment at the heart of them and showing how, as Adorno and Max Horkheimer make clear in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, capitalism and its ideological handmaiden, the culture industry,

capitalist subjects aren’t really enjoying themselves despite feeling that they are.
never really deliver.24 According to this view,

Such subjects actually exist in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction , and Adorno and Horkheimer hope to expose this dissatisfaction for what it is in order
to create a revolutionary consciousness akin to their own. For Marxist thinkers like those of the Frankfurt School, the chief problem with capitalism is that it promises

an enjoyment without ever delivering on that promise (even to those who seem taken care of by the capitalist system).

A psychoanalytic interrogation of capitalism is the only way to challenge the never

ending drive of accumulation
McGowan 2013  [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

The drive to
At times, Marx indicates how the capitalist mode of production transforms the driving force of human activity, and he implicitly envisions Communism as a corrective to this transformation.

accumulate, in this view, ceases to be a drive inherent in human subjectivity itself, and an alternative becomes
visible. In the second volume of Capital, Marx almost articulates the position of psychoanalytic emancipatory politics directly when he says, “For capitalism is already essentially
abolished once we assume that it is enjoyment that is the driving motive and not enrichment itself .” Here, the
distinction between enjoyment and enrichment as motives for action divides capitalism from other unmentioned economic systems. The alternative to accumulation is satisfaction — or,

more specifically, the recognition of our satisfaction . The fundamental problem with capitalism is this: it doesn’t

allow us to recognize our enjoyment or even to grasp enjoyment as what drives us . It’s not that capitalism deprives us of the
satisfaction involved with thinking, loving, theorizing, singing, painting, and fencing (to use Marx’s examples cited above) but that it doesn’t allow us to view satisfaction as a possible motive for our acts. We can think of the drive

the death drive — would have no purpose other

for enjoyment or a drive centered around enjoyment as a possibility existing outside of the capitalist system. This drive —

than enjoyment, which is to say that it would operate in contrast to the accumulative logic of the
capitalist drive. The capitalist drive to accumulate represents a distortion of the death drive, a rewriting of it that changes its structure. But the capitalist drive to accumulate does not simply do away with
enjoyment. As a rewriting of the death drive, it continues to provide the enjoyment that this drive does, though this drive to accumulate makes it more difficult for subjects to identify the site where they enjoy. Our investment in
capitalism doesn’t occur through a complete neglect of our enjoyment but depends in a fundamental way on its ability to deliver enjoyment. If capitalist subjects weren’t actually enjoying themselves at all, they would not continue

to be capitalist subjects. We really do enjoy ourselves within the capitalist universe — the death drive continues to function — but we don’t enjoy in the way that capitalist
ideology tries to convince us that we do. Political struggle is not simply a struggle over the right to enjoy certain goods and the distribution of this right. It is also
— even predominantly — a struggle over how we identify and locate our enjoyment . Capitalist ideology is triumphant

today because it has won this struggle. As capitalist subjects, we must define enjoyment in terms of accumulation: one enjoys insofar as one accumulates objects of desire. This
definition has become ubiquitous: according to the prevailing logic today, even the enjoyment that derives from romance comes from acquiring one’s object of desire. But this is not the only way of figuring enjoyment. One

of the most important political tasks for emancipatory politics today consists in transforming our way
of thinking about enjoyment — breaking the link that capitalist ideology has forged between
accumulation and enjoyment.

The alt is breaking away from the fantastical promises capitalism makes.
McGowan 2013  [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

When it comes to fantasy’s role in the subject’s experience, Western philosophy seems to have a clear
political content — and even a political program. This program involves stripping away the seductive lure of fantasy in order to acquaint
subjects not with b are reality but with the way that reality is produced. This emphasis on critiquing fantasy in the name of production provides a clear link to Marx and Marxism,
despite Marx’s hostility to philosophy. As is well known, Marx attacks philosophy for its failure to become politically efficacious. His diatribe against philosophy finds its most straightforward
expression in the eleventh of his “Theses on Feuerbach.” Here Marx claims: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”17
According to Marx, philosophers have failed in the central duty of thought: having a practical effect on the world rather than just arriving at a theoretical understanding of it. Marx sees
philosophy itself as the problem, and hence he sees the need to break from philosophy altogether if thought is to become politicized. In The Philosophy of Marx Étienne Balibar claims: “The
Theses on Feuerbach . . . demand a definitive exit (Ausgang) from philosophy, as the only means of realizing what has always been its loftiest ambition: emancipation, liberation.”18 But Marx’s
call for a “definitive exit” from philosophy comes to seem paradoxical when we consider the politics of philosophy in juxtaposition with the tenets of Marxist politics. Despite his attack on

Marx’s political critique of capitalist

philosophy’s failure to politicize itself, Marx himself actually adopts a version of philosophy’s conception of politics.

relations of production is at almost every instance a critique of the tendency of these relations to
produce subjects entranced by fantasy and thus unable to see how the economic structure of capitalism
actually functions. The fundamental fantasy of the capitalist subject is that of an individual existence
that owes nothing to the larger social structure in which it resides. Throughout his career as an analyst and critic of
capitalism, Marx combated this fantasy, but nowhere more directly than in the Grundrisse. From the beginning of the first notebook in this work, Marx works

to show that the individual is never an isolated monad but part of a larger social order that makes
individual existence possible. The act of historicizing allows us, he claims, to give the lie to individual independence. As he puts it, “The more deeply we go back into
history, the more deeply does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole.”19 Historicizing renders visible the array of social

capitalist subjects believe in their own

forces that have enabled the individual to act in an apparently independent manner. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave,

unfettered agency because they cannot turn their heads to see [realize] the forces holding them in place
and controlling what they see. The ahistorical thinking that predominates under capitalism blinds individuals to their social dependence, and this blindness
acts as an insurmountable barrier to proletarian class consciousness and the overthrow of capitalism.
The individualist fantasy that capitalism promulgates fails to think through its own implications, and
Marx attacks the fantasy on this front as well. Just as fantasy as such owes its cogency to its lack of coherence, to its ability to exist in contradiction with
itself, the individualist fantasy depends on restricting it to a few isolated individuals. Though the individualist believes that everyone is an individual and is capable of acting as a free agent, this

The fantasy envisions workers saving money and raising themselves up in this
status is implicitly denied to the majority.

manner to the status of capitalists. In this (almost universally accepted) account of things, capitalism is a meritocracy that rewards the industrious and penalizes
the lazy. But as Marx points out, the fantasy unravels as soon as we imagine it being universally taken up. He says: Only as an
exception does the worker succeed through will power, physical strength and endurance, greed etc., in transforming his coin into money, as an exception from his class and from the general
conditions of his existence. If all or the majority are too industrious (to the degree that industriousness in modern industry is in fact left to their own personal choice, which is not the case in
the most important and most developed branches of production), then they increase not the value of their commodity, but only its quantity; that is, the demands which would be placed on it
as use value. . . . An individual worker can be industrious above the average, more than he has to be in order to live as a worker, only because another lies below the average, is lazier; he can

By thinking through the individualist fantasy to its endpoint and imagining what would happen if everyone
save only because and if another wastes.

Marx reveals the contradiction that proponents of the fantasy must simply ignore.
adopted the policy of industriousness,

All fantasizing obscures such contradictions, and this is the key to fantasy’s power.
 Anti-Blackness
Here’s our thesis: the aff is coercive mimeticism that locks fantasies of racial
wholeness in place, this forces children to internalize the truth of identity categories
which causes endless psychic suffering which should frame your decision calculus
Viego 07 [Antonio Viego, Professor of Ethnic Studies @ Duke, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss
in Latino Studies, 2014, //Stefan]

An essay in the collection authored by David O. Sears and Sheri Levy, ‘‘Childhood and Adult Political
Development,’’ illustrates how Chow’s notion of ‘‘coercive mimeticism’’ might be seen to function in
young ethnic-racialized children. However, Sears and Levy do not address the power-knowledge relation
that compels this mimicry internal to biopower. The authors’ work is interesting in the context of this
discussion because of how they link the acquisition of ethnic-racialized identity to ‘‘political
development.’’ Political development on these grounds, although perhaps necessary at a particular
stage in the development of a young ethnic-racialized subject’s politicization, must ultimately, given the
contemporary politics of multiculturalism in U.S. universities today, be subjected to serious criticism.
The notion of politicization around ethnic-racialized identity that is being compelled in young people is a
form of coercion, taking the shape of a compelled unpaid labor of ethnicracialized resemblance and
representation on college and university campuses in the service of following through on the post-Bakke
1978 decision’s ‘‘diversity rationale.’’∑∑ Richard T. Ford explains, ‘‘The diversity rationale is benign when
understood as one of many possible reasons a university might care about the racial demographics of its
student body. But it is dangerous when codified as the only reason race is significant. . . . A more subtle
and much more pernicious implication hovered over post-Bakke university life: only by highlighting their
own distinctiveness could minority students justify their presence in the universities that admitted
them.’’∑∏ In attempting to understand children’s ethnic identity development, Sears and Levy turn to
Jean S. Phinney’s and William E. Cross’s three-stage model of ethnic identity. In the first stage,
‘‘unexamined ethnic identity’’ (Phinney) or ‘‘preencounter’’ (Cross), children have not explored their
ethnic identity. . . . Children who have not examined their ethnic identity might have negative feelings
toward their own group (Cross 1978, see Phinney 1989). In the second stage, ‘‘ethnic identity search’’ or
‘‘encounter and immersion,’’ young persons seek out information about their group (e.g., reading books
on ethnicity, visiting ethnic museums). This stage is considered a turning point akin to an identity crisis
(Erikson 1968). Active identity exploration often begins in high school or college but may begin in middle
school or even younger as children express identity through joining ethnicity-based peer groups
(Rotheram-Borus 1993).∑π Regarding the negative feelings arising in the children discussed in the
italicized sentence, perhaps it has less to do with the children having not examined their ethnic-
racialized identity and more to do with their having come to understand in some way that their identity
—insofar as they will be seen to actually possess one by others—will be predicated on the labors of
ethnic-racialized resemblance. At the very least, we need to entertain this possibility. In a culture like
that of the United States, where virtually all aspects of daily life are profoundly suffused with racialized
meanings, to deny that children’s negativity regarding their respective cultural groups might not also be
a protesting response to the imperative that they accept being marked out as culturally different
material to begin with is to deny the complicated cognitive and intellectual work carried out by children.
The authors continue, ‘‘In stage 3, ‘achieved ethnic identity’ or ‘internalization,’ adolescents have
developed positive self-concepts as members of their group.’’∑∫ This three-step process describes how
children learn to assume an identity as ethnic-racialized in U.S. culture. They internalize the various
disciplinary codes and rules of proper ethnic-racialized comportment in order to be able to resemble the
acceptable American ethnic-racialized subject. The process also describes how this internalization works
to preempt the interpretative labor—to engage, we might say, in Spillers’s practice of interior
intersubjectivity—that might allow the children to ask why these extra categories attach to them and
not others and why fully assuming these ethnic-racialized identity categories provides the primary
means upon which they will be thought to have reached the status of intelligible human subject.
Children are in fact manifesting these questions. We are not listening closely enough to this embattled
speech, because we are not sufficiently imbued, like the lame psychoanalyst who can’t intervene at the
Symbolic because she prefers to play cat and mouse in the Imaginary, with the new terms and
conditions lending social and cultural intelligibility to ethnic-racialized subjects on the basis of self-
mimicry. In the passage that ends chapter 3, Ford writes, ‘‘It may be that the price of providing our
descendants with a world free of social stigma and oppression of identities such as race, a world we
could be proud to call more just, is that they would not share our identities, that they would be our heirs
but not our descendants.’’∑Ω Our deafness to this embattled, learned speech among young ethnic-
racialized subjects, who are choking on these coercive edicts, amounts to our irresponsible and
shameful refusal to not allow them to choose not to be our descendants, to not be plagued by our
symptoms. We need to take seriously that these young people may draw their inspiration from the
difficult and, for some, impossible declaration that Fanon startles his readers with in the concluding
pages to Black Skin, White Masks: ‘‘In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the
peoples of color. . . . I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the
expense of my present and my future.’’∏≠ Why should these children have to suffer the persistent
ghosts and symptoms of their ancestors? The three steps outlined in the experiment above describe the
implantation of ethnicity and race as, to use Spillers’s language, ‘‘a poisonous idea . . . insinuates itself
not only across and between ethnicities but within.’’∏∞ The researchers never ask: Why do the children
do this? Why do they think they have to do this? What compels an understanding of identity, ethnic-
racialized or otherwise, in this way? Again, the question arises: ‘‘Who, for example, decides what
constitutes a problem for the patient? And by what criteria?’’∏≤ One of the researchers they rely on,
Cross, understands a ‘‘strong ethnic identity as serving the protective function of filtering one’s social
worldview so as to . . . make it less dehumanizing.’’∏≥ A strong ethnic-racialized identity, as I have been
arguing, is predicated on a strengthened ego. This is held out to some as the instantiating condition
defining their humanness and, from a Lacanian position, could result only in a more thorough alienation
of the human subject. What if the very idea of a ‘‘strong ethnic-racialized identity’’ is what in fact
dramatizes a racialization practice that, to return to Cross’s words, reveals to the child the ‘‘social
worldview’’ as more ‘‘dehumanizing’’? What would constitute a weak ethnic-racialized identity? More
important, what is the purported effect of a weak ethnic-racialized identity on a child? Sears and Levy
claim, ‘‘The protection comes from accepting that racism exists and affects all blacks, that negative
outcomes are because of a racist system and not the self, and that one can use various strategies to deal
with racism (withdrawal, assertion, avoidance, passivity). Other functions that a strong identity may
serve include providing purpose, meaning, and affiliation, often expressed in celebration of
accomplishments of the black community.’’∏∂ The commonsense nature of this claim is very seductive,
and I certainly don’t want to be construed as suggesting that celebrating the cultural productions,
histories, or traditions of a group to which you understand your self linked to or belonging to is bad. I am
saying that this characterization of the best defense against racism is hardly that. It works as an
Imaginary explanation, however, as long as one remains intoxicated by the idea of a strong ethnic
racialized ego. These approaches seem to accept that race won’t budge, as we argued earlier, without
understanding the need for an interpretative practice like Spillers’s interior intersubjectivity that tries to
explain to oneself and to others why race won’t budge, why, as Seshadri-Crooks writes, ‘‘it shows no
evidence of disappearing or evaporating in relevance.’’∏∑ These clinical and speculative exchanges on
ethnic psychology, Hispanic psychology, and political psychology reveal a tremendous disparity. A
culture criticism and ideology critique like Chow’s or a legally inflected critique like Ford’s understands
the consequences of accepting the terms of being an ethnic-racialized subject in a way very different
from what is imagined by the ‘‘clinical’’ material as the major stumbling block: weak ethnic-racialized
identities–qua–egos. Let me restate the central problem as this book has seen it: we have developed no
language to talk about ethnic-racialized identity that is not entirely ego- and social psychological and
that does not imagine a strong ego as the desired outcome in a racist, white supremacist world.

Psychoanalysis IS the most radical option- racialized legal oppression is not immutable
but rather a function of white ego formation - the alternative is key to breaking this
down
- Fire card in theory
- Answers drapetomania bc drapetomania=early or “social” psychology that Lacanian analysis is
directly in opposition to
- Also, mechanisms of slave enforcement (including drapetomania) or colonial control are LEGAL
rather than Symbolic structures->i.e., based in a failure to recognizes that racialization grows out
of the desire for identitarian wholeness
- Seemingly unchangeable racialized oppression is actually a function of coercive mimeticism-
>afropessimist strategies lock that in place and can’t solve->should be paired with some kind of
insurrection bad/semniocap argument

Viego 07 [Antonio Viego, Professor of Ethnic Studies @ Duke, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss
in Latino Studies, 2014, //Stefan]

The editors of Critical Race Theory write, ‘‘We began to think of our project as uncovering how law was a
constitutive element of race itself; in other words, how law constructed race.’’π∑ My project agrees with
this assessment, but I would extend the law’s reach a bit more to suggest that it also constructs ethnic-
racialized subjects and in this sense plays in concert with what Chow names ‘‘coercive mimeticism’’ by
helping circulate scripts for what it means to be a proper, that is, identifiable ethnic-racialized subject
worthy of protection. My position is like and unlike the critical legal theory position that, in the editors’
words, is skeptical, even disdainful, of any political project organized around race. One could say that
any concerted effort to focus on race risks reifying it. That’s old news. I’m more concerned with
addressing how any engagement with race by the legal apparatus produces a hollowed-out subject, an
ego- and social psychological subject, how the legal apparatus encourages the sad imbecility of feeling
compelled to resemble that which is ethnicracialized and how it disseminates impoverished readings of
ethnic-racialized subjectivity over scores of generations—its bullying effects—and how this affects social
and political movements staged by ethnic-racialized subjects. It may be that justice for ethnic-racialized
subjects in a white supremacist society can be achieved only on the condition of the exhaustive
reduction of these subjects to social and cultural explications, to the utter exclusion of understanding
them as subjects in language, subjects of the signifier, subjects with an unconscious. The following
quotation by the legal theorist and scholar Richard T. Ford echoes my own sentiment with respect to
whether the law, dependent as it is upon an ego- and social psychological framework for theorizing the
ethnicracialized subject that partly reproduces the reductive and calculating logic of racism in the very
act of protecting disprized subjects from discrimination, can ever guarantee social justice. Ford writes, ‘‘I
don’t think law is capable of resolving or banishing this contradiction. In that sense law is incapable of
guaranteeing social justice. Social justice for people of color and for other stigmatized minorities will
require a revolutionary cultural transformation, one more sweeping and more penetrating perhaps than
any we’ve seen. Perhaps one more profound than any society can achieve while remaining the same
society.’’π∏ Allow me to speculate on what I think might set the ground work for a ‘‘cultural
transformation.’’ To begin with, we might react to Ford’s claims by noting—with a rather broad stroke—
that the revolutionary transformation that will have to be effected will necessitate a radically different
theorization of ethnic-racialized subjectivity—one that willfully refuses to allow these questions to be
ceded entirely to the social sciences, especially psychology. In the essay, Ford develops a notion,
‘‘compelled performance’’ that sheds important light on how Chow’s theory of ‘‘coercive mimeticism’’
plays out in the legal apparatus. He writes, ‘‘Contemporary multiculturalism worries a lot about ‘silence,’
‘absence,’ and ‘exclusion’ but very little about ‘speaking for others,’ ‘conscription,’ and ‘compelled
performances.’ If misrecognition is a serious harm, then we must be concerned that legal recognition
may go wrong, misrecognizing already subordinated groups and codifying that misrecognition with the
force of law and the intractability of stare decisis. We’d better be pretty sure that the traits the law
recognizes are the right ones.’’ππ To translate this into the terms of my argument, I would say that since
the law can recognize and codify only traits based on ego- and social psychological notions, a profound
misrecognition is built into the law’s ability to see and comprehend the human subject as a rights-
bearing subject. I’m not suggesting that there is a pure line of vision that would perfectly capture the
traits of the subject in some brilliant and exasperating explanation, as though that were even a desirable
goal. To the contrary, I am suggesting that the law won’t own up, can’t own up to the fact of
misrecognition, denying the Lacanian lesson taught in the mirror stage article, that ‘‘misrecognition’’
constitutes the very structure of subjectivity. But ‘‘misrecognition’’ may simply be the price to pay for
‘‘protective custody,’’ as Ford explains: ‘‘Cultural or identity rights are a form of protective custody: the
witness gets protection, sure. The violent accused is thwarted in his plot to silence the witness or exact
revenge. But the price of protection is incarceration.’’π∫ Shifting gears somewhat abruptly in an effort to
link Lacan’s theory of the subject who precipitates in the Symbolic versus legal recognition’s attempt to
safeguard against the very appearance of the subject in deference to the masterful ego ensconced in the
Imaginary, I want to transfer Ford’s notion of ‘‘incarceration’’ into the context of the clinical setting, one
gone awry, where the analyst erroneously engages the analysand only along the imaginary axis in
Lacan’s Schema L (figure 3), from one ego (a) to the other, counterpart ego (a%), in effect incarcerating
the analysand in the Imaginary. The analyst failing to be fully imbued with the understanding of the
difference between the Symbolic and Imaginary effectively prevents the appearance of the Subject (and
the unconscious), represented by the S in the upper left-hand corner. What emerges from this in the
legal context is an ego politics of the Imaginary. As I explained earlier in the book, the Imaginary in Lacan
is dominated by rivalry and hostility. Moreover, to be trapped in the Imaginary, in addition to compelling
a kind of social psychosis, as Teresa Brennan argues in History after Lacan, radically undermines the
human subject’s ability to make linkages and connections between historical events— undermines, in
fact, the ability to historicize, period. Brennan writes, And as we shall see, when Lacan refers to making
connections he says that the process is also one of ‘‘rewriting history.’’ To avoid confusion, it should be
emphasized at the outset that rewriting history, in the sense of making connections, is for Lacan an
attribute of the symbolic. His theory of history is an account of how that symbolic activity, and a great
deal else besides, is curtailed by the imaginary ego’s era. In other words, Lacan is describing a specific
era in history—that of the ego. But the era he is describing is one that curtails historical thinking.πΩ
Making connections and links between historical events is threatened by the interference generated by
the Imaginary in symbolic relations. In the 1950s, Lacan saw the reduction of this interference as the
primary analytical goal. We might return now to ego psychology and its role in helping inscribe an image
of ethnic-racialized subjectivity in the letter of the law. Again, Martin Bergmann reminds us that the ego
psychologists who came to the United States seemed to forget history: ‘‘In spite of the emphasis on
adaptation, the Hartmann group showed surprisingly little interest in the outside world. Hitler, World
War II, and the Holocaust left no discernible impression on their thinking. . . . Denying what happened in
Europe appears to have been a necessary defense for their adaptation to America.’’∫≠ The field of ego
psychology established in the United States is not only a symptom of the ego’s era, in whose language it
speaks, it is also run through by a kind of turning away from making historical links and connections. The
codification of an ego psychological understanding of ethnic-racialized subjectivity in the service,
ostensibly, of crafting legal forms of social redress that correct upon a history of legal and extralegal
systemic racist practices, oddly enough, in that very move, accomplishes a kind of refusal to engage this
same history because of how it theorizes these subjects only along the Imaginary, thus rendering the
project of making historical links and connections virtually impossible. My argument in this chapter has
insisted on the intimate historical links between ego psychology, social psychology, rights discourse, and
the power of the state to weigh in on what ethnic-racialized difference and psychological trauma means,
as predicated upon ego- and social psychological assumptions and tenets, and why I think we’re
tragically stuck since we are fueled by the false amplitudes that yield from being addressed as ego and
only as ego. If it appears to be the case that legal and political recognition for disprized ethnicracialized
subjects in U.S. culture in the twenty-first century can be secured only to the extent that we be
hallucinated as psychological subjects at risk according to the Imaginary politics of ego and social
psychology, then employing a more Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of ethnic-racialized subjects as
rights-bearing subjects in language would precipitate subjectivities that we probably wouldn’t even
recognize. Returning to some of Judith Butler’s language in a passage quoted above, we might ask what
price would have to be paid in order to bring to a definitive close the U.S. legal dimension’s longstanding
dependency on ego and social psychology in crafting visions of ethnic-racialized subjectivity and
experience in a white supremacist society. Ford has a provisional answer to this question: ‘‘It may be
that the price of providing our descendants with a world free of social stigma and oppression of
identities such as race, a world we could be proud to call more just, is that they would not share our
identities, that they would be our heirs but not our descendants.’’∫∞

Antiblack violence in the US is explained by the notion that the other has the illusory
objet a, that which gives it wholeness. White American anger is directed towards black
folk as a result of the fantasy that black folk are experiencing a kind of wholeness and
excess joy that white people don’t have access to in the afterlife of slavery.
George 16 [Sheldon George is a Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American
literature @ Simmons College. “Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity”.
Baylor University Press. SW]
 These fears point to a deeper hatred
Read from this book’s Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, Dunn’s fears facilitate analysis of not just race but also the core process of othering2 that is constitutive of racial difference.

of the other that is veiled by the restrictions upon self-expression imposed by America’s shifting
discourses on race. Blurring the lines between selfdefense and hatred, what today complicates cases
such as Dunn’s and Zimmerman’s is our increased inability to account for racist motivations. Though African Americans
remain largely convinced that race continues to be a primary factor in American life, as a result of the successes of the civil rights movement, Americans have become more conscious of the moral impropriety of racial bias. While this self-consciousness has led to more respectful
treatment of African Americans, it has also allowed Americans to become more adept at a kind of self-policing that enables the expression of racially biased opinions through the screen of politically correct speech.3 In the supposedly postracial era initiated by the presidency of Barack

Thus the discourse of race has shifted to such arenas as

Obama, in which race purportedly no longer matters, it is impolite both to express racist views and to accuse others of racism.

culture, which recall race without naming it. This shift is what we see particularly in the Dunn case,
where rap music becomes the link of association Dunn uses to bind African Americans to “thug culture”
and define them as criminals in need of violent disciplinary instruction in proper conduct. Though masked within this shift, Dunn’s

Dunn
desire to discipline racial others subsumes his articulated motive of fear under a deeper hatred of the racial other as true inspiration for his actions. In evading direct reference to racial difference through a focus upon the boys’ “behavior” and the rap music they enjoy,

simultaneously divulges a hatred of the other that extends beyond race toward what Jacques Lacan
calls the other’s jouissance, or enjoyment, the very core around which, I suggest, otherness articulates
itself to constitute racial difference. It is against this jouissance that Dunn’s actions must be read , and it
is this jouissance that explains the possibility for hatred in contemporary America to address itself at
racial difference without need of acknowledging this difference. Lacanian theory defines jouissance as
the pleasure made available to the subject through the mediation of discourse, the pleasure availed this
subject by his or her ability to ground a psychic sense of the self as coherent, autonomous, and self-
controlled through use of the mechanisms of language and fantasy . Where Lacan reveals the subject to be psychically split, most noticeably between the conscious and

This book identifies white racial

unconscious, control over the discourses that define the self, and over the environment this self occupies, becomes a means of veiling the gap that fissures all individual subjectivity.

identity as just such a discourse for white Americans, serving to ground white identity in the jouissance
of language and fantasy. Fueling Dunn’s fears and hatred is apprehension over the dwindling hegemony
of this discourse. Information exposed in Dunn’s trial and in letters Dunn wrote from prison help to
identify his aggressive response to Davis and his friends as a form of aggressivity, the aggression that
emerges in the subject specifically upon recognition of the fracturing of his or her self-image .4 In Dunn’s case, I would suggest,
this fracturing is bound to a devaluing of the sway of his personal and racial identity, a devaluing that Dunn senses through his inability to dominate the space and interpersonal environment he occupies.As Dunn returns to the Jacksonville neighborhood he once knew but has not lived in
for a number of years, what initiates the conflict between Dunn and the teenage boys is his request that they turn down the loud music that dominates this space. Dunn experiences a frustration that seems bound to spatial restriction, as he sits parked in a spot outside of the gas station’s
store that positions him in such tight proximity to the boys’ SUV and loud music that his own doors, rattling from the pounding bass, could only open partially. The entire incident seems to involve for Dunn a reversal in the natural order of things, a restriction upon his entitled freedoms
that only gets extended by his imprisonment after the shooting. Expressing, after his arrest, his frustration and uncertainty as to whether he “should feel like [he’s] a victim of reverse-discrimination or a political prisoner,” Dunn is convinced that “either way” the “state of Florida is
screwing [him] over.”5 Dunn remains self-assured that he is “being held, illegally,” because “the blacks” are “calling the shots, in the media and the courts,”6 despite his contradicting assertion that “the jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs.”7 Dunn designates the prison he
occupies with these blacks “Thugville,”8 asking, “Why am I here?”9 Though lamenting that it is “so sad in this day and age we’re still divided by race,”10 Dunn affirms, “I’m glad I don’t live in Jacksonville, the murder capitol [sic] of Florida.”11 While both distancing himself from the site of
the murder and absolving himself of blame for its commission, Dunn seeks to establish an exclusionary identity defined by its discreet relation to place and by this identity’s disciplinary function over racial others who enter spaces he seeks to control. Dunn declares, “This may sound a bit
radical, but if more people would arm themselves and kill these fucking idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”12 Correcting improper behavior is at the heart of Dunn’s actions and trial. Though Dunn’s disciplinary actions are
addressed to black males, he speaks in a moralistic vein more acceptable even to African Americans about cultural vices. Dunn argues, “I’m really not prejudiced against race, but I have no use for certain cultures. This gangster-rap, ghetto talking thug ‘culture’ that certain segments of

Our ability to recognize the problematic relation between rap music and
society flock to is intolerable. They espouse violence and disrespect toward women.”13

the glorification of violence lends support to Dunn’s suggestion that his actions are not racist. But what
Dunn’s remarks express is a hatred directed at rap music as a source of enjoyment, or jouissance, that
has come to be identified with black Americans more broadly. Dunn takes part in a contemporary discourse that binds difference not to the body but to jouissance.

Difference may be isolated from the racial body in this manner because it is ultimately jouissance that
grounds difference, establishing this difference through its circumscription of the fantasy object Lacan
calls the object a. Most precisely, jouissance designates the pleasure that would emerge from an
impossible wholeness. Lacan explains, however, that in the face of such impossibility the signifier
serves as “the cause of jouissance,” producing pleasure through its articulation of the fantasies of
wholeness, or being, that compensate for subjective lack.14 This being, lost to the subject, is defined as
a psychic sense of unity, autonomy, and individuality that the subject can construct only through the
signifier’s isolation of the object a, the illusory lost object that promises to return the subject to a
jouissancefilled state of wholeness. In American society, this fantasy object a, I argue, is often racial
identity, supporting both difference and jouissance-inducing fantasies of being . Within the fantasies of
the racialized subject, this object a of race, this “object that puts itself in the place of what cannot be
glimpsed of the other” and the self, serves as the “basis of being,” isolating an imaginary core self that
“holds the image [of the racial body] together,” granting it psychic and semantic significance for the
subject. More so than the physical body, it
15 Race, as object a, functions as what I would call after Lacan the “para-being,” the “being beside,” which is “substitute[ed] . . . for the being that would take flight.”16

is racial identity as founded by this illusory core being, the racial essence distinct to each racial group,
that provides structure and coherence to fantasies of difference But where this a as racial core is both .

illusory and thus elusive, what racial fantasies ultimately isolate as proof of the other’s alterity is the
other’s enjoyment, which is perceived as an index of this other’s jouissance , a reification of the bliss
experienced by this other through access to an illusory a. In racial fantasies, the other’s visible or even
stylized expressions of pleasure, which are exemplified so distinctly in music, come to define the other’s
particular mode of jouissance, his or her specific manner of accessing being. This visible enjoyment helps
to construct the other as bound to a distinctive jouissance of being that differentiates self from other
and racial group from racial group. Through the group’s mode of jouissance, its very being or core self is defined and its racial identity is solidified. Racial alterity is thus often contextualized by a fantastical sense of the
incompatibility of the other’s mode of jouissance with that of the subjective self, or that of this self’s racial group; but the other’s jouissance, bound to fantasy, actively oscillates between subjective imaginings that designate it alternately as alien and as excessive, and this jouissance can

Where hatred of the other

therefore also found what Lacan terms “jealouissance,” the frustrated hatred that may spring forth from the subject upon conviction that the other “has the a” and accesses a bountiful bliss the subject lacks.17

is fundamentally “addressed to being” and is essentially isolated through the jouissance perceived in the
other’s manifest enjoyment, it is toward the bountiful excesses of a visible pleasure alien to Dunn’s self-
identity, an unrestrained jouissance of being expressed in the boys’ loud rap music and undisciplined
behavior, that Dunn directs his hatred and aggressivity

Investment in race as a unique signifier binds studies to the past, creating a process of
repetition that leads to psychic trauma
George 16 [Sheldon George is a Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American
literature @ Simmons College. “Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity”.
Baylor University Press. P13-16 SW]

The limitation of most African American scholarly investigations of race, is their allegiance to I argue,

conceptions of discourse, race, and agency that are framed not by psychoanalysis but by
poststructuralist criticism. Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist argument that “centers” of meaning have
“no natural [or] fixed locus” but are secured instead by discourse provides for the scholarship on race an
anxiously alluring appeal. The anxiety associated with this theory emerges because poststructuralism
1

poses a challenge to the very concept of race itself, which for many African American scholars provides
both a sense of identity and a route toward agency. As early as 1987 Barbara Christian, a pioneer of African American studies, articulated the rationale for resisting this theory, observing that
poststructuralist critique of the center emerged “just when the literature of peoples of color . . . began to move to ‘the center.’ ”2 But, even when not explicitly employing poststructuralist theory, African American scholars nevertheless mirror its signature processes of decentering and

We see this, for example, in the assertion of leading African American

discursively resignifying identity in their efforts to establish race as a “social construct.”

scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. that “precisely because ‘blackness’ is a socially constructed category, it
must be learned through imitation,” and, most important for Gates, it is therefore also open to
“repetition and revision.”3 This attempt to revise race discursively is essential to African American
theoretical conceptions of agency; but, like poststructuralist models, it is limited by its frequent failure
to acknowledge and account for influences upon race and the racial subject that lie outside of the
structure imposed by discourse. While this focus upon discourse directs much of contemporary race theory toward analyses of what we may call after Jacques Lacan the social Symbolic, Trauma and Race is an attempt not only to
articulate the impact of the discursive signifiers of race on the unconscious of African Americans but also to circumscribe a traumatic Real that escapes and indeed structures the agency of the signifiers of the Symbolic. Lacan speaks of the Real as the excluded center of the subject.

Coining the term “extimate,” Lacan defines the Real as that which simultaneously is most intimate, or
internal to the subject, and excluded from symbolization This extimate Real, I suggest, is what a .4

theoretical focus solely upon discourse misses . My work links this Real to slavery as an exclusion within
the social Symbolic that yet shapes the discourse of race and indeed founds central aspects of African
American and American identity. However, my interest is not so much in the history of slavery as in the
ineffable experience of jouissance—or excessive, traumatizing pain and pleasure—that issues out of this
Real past to fuel the psychic desires and fantasies of Americans. Tying this trauma to the fundamental trauma of subject formation, the traumatic elision of being that occurs

slavery as marking an upsurge of jouissance, such that slavery comes to signify a moment
with the onset of subjectivity, I read
in time when the pleasures and pains associated with being are open to manipulation by white
Americans. What enables such manipulation is the concept of race itself, thus constituted by slavery
as an apparatus of jouissance that African Americans today still struggle to control and manipulate .
But this precarious source of jouissance and being remains for African Americans an illusory object of
attachment that binds them to the unbearable past . Through the function of the signifier, , race I argue

enables a psychoanalytic process of repetition that once again produces for African Americans the
psychic trauma of the Real. Maintaining therefore, that slavery has produced a historical legacy that is ,

both discursive and psychical, I turn to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory because his fundamental
assertion that the “unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject” offers a more
expansive understanding of the workings of the signifier than is available in other theoretical models. 5 Though
indebted to Freud for his ideas on the unconscious, much of Lacan’s thinking on the signifier emerges from a rereading of the seminal work in linguistics and semiotics produced by Ferdinand de Saussure, a theorist whose thinking also influenced Derrida. However, the divergences

Both Lacan
between Lacan’s and Derrida’s theories offer radical implications both for how we understand the effects of the past upon African Americans and for how we conceptualize an African American agency meant to resist this past and its continuing legacy.

and Derrida derive from Saussure the notion that signifiers have no inherent meaning6 but instead
produce meaning by operating through what Lacan calls “themes of opposition” and “functions of
contrast and similitude.”7 Derrida advances this Saussurian reading by reducing signification to “absolute chance” and the “genetic indetermination” of the signifier, arguing that meaning only ever accumulates as a “trace,” as the by-product

Where Lacan differs from both Saussure and Derrida is in his

of differential relations established between signifiers in their“movement [along] a chain.”8

understanding of the signifier as not arbitrary or indeterminate but contingent upon causation that is
external to the Symbolic.

Focus on slavery as the sole signifier of blackness creates a paradox wherein blackness
can never escape its association to the injury of slavery, while white peoples’ psyche
fantasizes about an enjoyment in excess that only black people have access to
George 16 [Sheldon George is a Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American
literature @ Simmons College. “Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity”.
Baylor University Press. SW]

Focusing on this past, Du Bois presents us a narrative of the African American racial self that we may say,
with Lacan, “condense[s] in relation” to “a nucleus,” to an organizing, hollow center that structures the
signifiers of both Du Bois’ discourse and his identity Lacan explains that “when the subject tells his .43

story, something acts, in a latent way, that governs [his] syntax and makes it more and more
condensed.” What governs Du Bois’ narrative is not a movement toward race as the core of the self but
44

rather an identification of race as the signifying mark of a deeper injury and insult suffered by this self .
Du Bois’ sense of the injuries to which the racialized African American subject is exposed because of race
causes him to struggle against the concept of race, but Du Bois fails to discard this concept that both he
and science question because he simultaneously finds political value in the deployment of racial identity
and, more significantly, substitutes race for another signifier with which race holds a metonymical
relation: slavery But the signifier slavery that Du Bois chooses to
. These two signifiers, I suggest, are linked within a signifying chain that thus ensures Du Bois’ return to race.

emphasize does not only recuperate his racial identity it links this identity to slavery’s signifieds— ; more importantly,

insult, discrimination, disaster. As this source of insult and injury, slavery is the nucleus around which Du
Bois’ narrative and identity condense. I say with Lacan that this “nucleus refers to something traumatic,” something beyond slavery itself that “must be designated as belonging to the real” of subjective lack; and I argue
that Du Bois confronts this lack, as may contemporary African Americans, precisely because he begins by embracing a hyperbolic, historical relation to the signifiers of race and their injurious signifieds.45 The Rhetorical Self, Dominated by the Signifier In his rhetorical construction of the

Lacan’s work “links

self as racial, Du Bois subjects himself to a domination by the signifiers of race in ways that can be understood in relation to Lacan’s reading of the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy as central to subjective activity.

metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack.”46 Metonymy expresses what Lacan
identifies as the “properly signifying function” of language, the root effort of language to compensate
for lack by routing the subject’s desire along a signifying chain in which desire is “eternally extending
toward the desire for something else.” 47 This something else is the plenitude of being that the subject seeks continually to find through the metonymical movement of language, through both the “transfer of
signification” from one word to another within a signifying chain and the transfer of desire from one object to another as value and meaning are cast upon them by the signifier.48 It is this metonymical revaluing of race so as to retain it as a means of compensating for lack that we see in

Born in what he defines as “the century when the walls of race were clear and straight” and “there
Du Bois.

was no question of exact definition and understanding of the word,” Du Bois eventually comes to
question “the concept of race” because it “has so changed and presented so much contradiction.” 49

Insofar as Du Bois reaches toward race as that which promises to fill lack, he struggles with these
contradictions, shifting metonymically from the biological to the sociohistorical and eventually coming
full circle through the signifier slavery to ground his identity in this very contradiction. However, the
nature of this contradiction is such that it allows Du Bois a restrictive understanding of both his historical
and his psychic self. In pinning his identity to slavery, Du Bois moves from the operations of metonymy
to a metaphorical process whereby slavery is substituted as the dominating signifier for his (racial)
identity. Where metaphor involves the substitution of the signifier for that which it names, the
function of metaphor is to remanifest being, to give presence, through language, to absence . Most
notable through the subject’s self-representation in the signifier of his or her proper name, metaphor
allows for the emergence of the lost being in the only form through which it may manifest itself, as what
Lacan refers to as “the being of signifierness.” But what we see in Du 50 This lost being is thus the signified implied in the signifier of the subject’s proper name.

Bois is how the signifier of slavery restructures his subjective relation to being. In Du Bois’ narrative,
slavery functions as a dominating master signifier that delineates the meaning of Du Bois’ racial identity.
Not only does it substitute itself for Du Bois’ proper name as the signifier that will structure Symbolic
representation of his (racial) being, but it also conflates this being with the injury, insult, and
discrimination both he and the nonwhite world suffer today and have suffered in the past, thus
bonding them in a common identity. This substitution of identity and conflation of feelings is explained
by a Lacanian understanding of metaphor as that which brings to a halt the metonymical sliding of
desire and meaning through manifestation of a more lasting substitution, a “conjunction of two
signifiers” for which there is “the greatest disparity of the images signified.” 51 S disparity of the signified is what we see in Du Bois when slavery, the new
master signifier of his identity, structures Du Bois’ personal feelings and sense of being, in what he calls a “later reaction” to racism, around racial feelings that belong to all nonwhites. Slavery is able to produce this disparity that organizes his sliding feelings because metaphor does

52 In such juxtaposition, the substituting

not involve juxtaposition of two equally actualized signifiers but is instead a process in which one signifier has “replaced the other” in “the signifying chain.”

signifier of slavery suppresses other signifiers of identity, so that they remain present only “by virtue of
[their] (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain,” while it simultaneously delimits and occludes
the signifieds that emerge as an expression of this identity’s psychic and emotional reality. 53 In Du Bois’ discussion of his feelings
toward Negroes and Africa, these personal feelings are themselves the signifieds that will express and further elide his being, articulating this being around the substitute signifier slavery that displaces the multiple signifiers of Du Bois’ personal identity with its dominating historical
context

Signifiers of race rearticulate the subject’s sense of self around a lack that was once
defined in the past, repeating the trauma of slavery into the present
George 16 [Sheldon George is a Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American
literature @ Simmons College. “Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity”.
Baylor University Press. P 16-21 SW]

The cause that Trauma and Race demarcates is what I call the jouissance of slavery, a psychic experience
of trauma that emerges from the past and repeats itself in the present through the agency of the
signifier. It is the signifier that establishes the link through which this traumatic cause, germane to the
slave’s experience and not to that of his or her descendant, intrusively establishes its place in the
internal lives of African Americans. The signifier defines the category of race, allowing for a conscious
association of African Americans with a chain of signifiers that links them to the brutal historical past.
This linkage confronts African Americans not only with the terrible history itself but also with a traumatic
lack that, I will argue, was made manifest by slavery What the signifiers of race do, , whether . therefore

emanating from the racist other or whether willfully embraced as a source of identity, is rearticulate
the subject’s sense of self around an unveiled lack once defined in the racist past the discursive . Thus, I maintain,

linking of African American identity to this past becomes the means through which the trauma of
slavery is repeated in the experiences of African Americans . From Resignification to the Barred Subject The anticonceptual cause of which I speak, this more than historical

At the heart of these scholars’ work is a

jouissance of slavery, is precisely what is ignored by both Derridean poststructuralism and leading African American scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker.

focus on the Symbolic that actively limits African American agency and identity to what we may call after
Judith Butler “resignification,” the effort “to lay claim” to the terms that define us “precisely because of
the way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us prior to our full knowledge.” 11 Butler’s Derridean approach to agency and the challenges

Working, like Butler, with a conceptualization of the Symbolic

she recognizes in it are useful for shedding light on the mirroring route embraced by African American scholars.

as a closed system in which existent signifiers can only be resignified and recirculated, these scholars
confront a particular problematic that can be articulated as the prospect of “forging a future from
resources inevitably impure.” Without a viable methodology by which newness can enter into the
12

Symbolic, by which something alien to the system can either be introduced into it or act upon it, the
challenge these scholars come to embrace is how to rearticulate the terms of race “that [once] signaled
degradation” so that they can now “signify a new and affirmative set of meanings,” so that this
“reversal” is not one that “retains and reiterates the abjected history of the term.” 13 It is this focus on resignification that we see, for example,

Gates’ famous theory of “the signifying monkey,” defines a discursive practice of resistance that is
in which

grounded in a “formal revision” that “turns on repetition of formal structures, and their difference.” 14
Disregarding the psychoanalytic notion of repetition as tied to the unconscious and Real, Gates views African American culture as involved in continual efforts to produce a “chiasmus,” or what Gates articulates as a process of “repeating and simultaneously revising in one deft, discursive
act.”15 Gates relies, ultimately, on a model of agency that Derrida calls after Levi-Strauss “bricolage”: the process of making use of “the instruments [one] finds at [one’s] disposition around [oneself], those which are already there,” in one’s attempt to, by “trial and error, adapt them” to a

Though Gates seeks to imagine a beyond of this bricolage and reach outside of the
use for “which [they] had not been especially conceived.”16

American Symbolic by asserting that African Americans must turn to their own “black vernacular
tradition” itself in their efforts to “ ‘deconstruct,’ if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope
of race,” Gates limits agency to language, arguing that we must “take discourse itself as our common
subject. Both Gates and Baker bind African American political resistance to language and thus also to
”17

the Symbolic, with Baker viewing the slave narrative and historical figures like Booker T. Washington as
embracing a politics of “liberating manipulation” and “revolutionary renaming” that employs language
as a “black defense against and revision of ancient terrors, mistaken identities, dread losses 18 In the .”

view of an African American theory of race shaped by the work of thinkers like Gates and Baker, this
revisionary repetition has been and continues to be a means for blacks to alter the social structure of a
racist Symbolic. the problem with a theoretical focus on the Symbolic is that it
This effort at resignification is laudable and indeed necessary. But

does not acknowledge how what is extimate may impact upon the Symbolic and the discursive
activities of the subject beyond his or her conscious volition, and neither does it offer a direct means
to address the scars that may be left on the subject’s psyche through the operations of racism within
this Symbolic. what is missed in such a focus on the Symbolic is the very psychoanalytic
Indeed, it may be argued that

subject him- or herself. As Lacan states, “the subject is not the one who thinks” or speaks through discourse.19 Lacan’s work continually returns to a critique of what he calls “the I-cracy,” or “myth” of “the I that masters” discourse, the myth of

Known for his focus on the split subject, Lacan counters the I-cracy by asserting that “the
the “speaker” that “is identical to itself.”20

point” is “to know whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak.”21 In
opposition to the speaking subject of the I-cracy, Lacan “identifies the subject with that which is
originally subverted by the system of the signifier What Lacan points to is “the function of barring, the .”22

striking out of another thing” that his theory establishes as inherent in the subject’s relation to the
Other’s signifiers It is this process by which something essential to the subject is stricken from him or
.

her that I propose enables an understanding of the effects of slavery upon both the slave and
contemporary African Americans the subject can only emerge
. Lacanian theory shows that all subjects are constituted through the Other’s signifiers. More precisely, , Lacan argues,

as a signifier. Lacan notes that because language “exists prior to each subject’s entry into it,” the subject
is “the slave of a discourse” in which “his place is already inscribed at his birth.” 24 Gaining subjectivity and meaning through those “themes of
opposition” and “functions of contrast and similitude” that we have already seen are essential to the operations of the signifier, “this subject,” Lacan asserts, “which, was previously nothing if not a subject coming into being—solidifies into a signifier.”25 The function Lacan ascribes to the
 Subjectivity not only restricts the subject to the
Symbolic and its signifiers is that of producing the aphanisis of the subject, her or his “fading” or “disappearance” under the signifier’s agency.26

Other’s preexistent universe of meaning; it also deprives the subject of access to those essential
components of the self that cannot be circumscribed by signification, the unconscious and Real as the
barred or stricken portions of the self that constitute the fundamental lack of subjectivity . Where
Lacan’s work is particularly useful is in providing a comparative framework through which we may
distinguish a heightened aphanisic effect of the signifier upon the slave, a barring that often is again
manifested for African Americans as an internal lack when accosted by acts of racism. Lacan argues that what each “subject has to
free himself of is th[is] aphanisic effect of the . . . signifier.”27 This ethical stance fundamental to Lacanian theory coincides with my own efforts in Trauma and Race to imagine an agency beyond the Symbolic.

The affirmative defines race as a unique signifier, while the function of religion during
slavery proves the notion that race itself merely functions as an objet a – empirics. The
affirmative is a project of resignification that attempts to reclaim notions of blackness
– this is an illusory and impossible fantasy
George 16 [Sheldon George is a Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American
literature @ Simmons College. “Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity”.
Baylor University Press. 31-36 SW]

Race, is an object a established around lack as much for African Americans as it is for whites. The
I propose,

function of the object a is not only to signify loss but also to displace it through acts of
Lacan outlines in his reading of the fort-da

repetition, to reassociate traumatic entrance into the Symbolic with a temporally and qualitatively
distinct moment of trauma later experienced in the Symbolic. In place of the subject’s traumatic division in language, the mother’s departure from the room becomes

slavery as serving the function

temporally defined as the cause of the split or “Spaltung in the subject,” which is then repetitively represented as the true source of loss that is also “overcome by the alternating game, fort-da.”98 I read

of repetition for African Americans as the Symbolic and temporal signifier of a

that Lacan here assigns to the mother’s departure,

traumatic loss that is more deeply psychic. Slavery comes to serve this function because it eruptively
displays psychic lack. Lacan defines repetition as “the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance.”99 Where this irruption designates a breach inward and a splitting of the subject, I identify in slavery a simultaneous eruption or outpouring of

. I suggest that both these residual signifiers (even when

jouissance that finds its Symbolic representatives across distances of time through the signifiers of race

redefined by African Americans) and the acts of racism that may grow out of them are repetitions that
function in relation to the jouissance of this past that both displaces and displays psychic lack. Slavery’s
exhibition of the slave’s lack and its insistence upon the master’s exultant and autonomous being
produced within the Symbolic a certain excess or surplus of jouissance, enabling discursive and power
structures through which access to jouissance became unusually open to manipulation. Slavery thus
marks a traumatic moment in which jouissance as both lack and excess is localized. This eruption of
jouissance thereby positions slavery as a temporal representative of the lack that is the Lacanian Real . It
is the signifiers of race that help to both localize this lack temporally and bind it to the identity of
those subjects who come to be called African Americans. The concept of race came to center African
American identity because it not only augmented the signifier’s essential function of striking being from
the subject, actively restricting the slave’s access to fantasies of self, but also presented itself as an
object of contention that promised to re-establish the illusory existence of this being. As is true in the case of the child of the fort-da,

the signifier, as designator of the object a, is ever a protective source of identity, and so race is often
exceedingly empowering for African Americans. race alone could In slavery and beyond, it offers subjects a sense of direction, belonging, and self-worth. But

guarantee neither community nor being for enslaved blacks. To truly understand the notion of being
that slaves were able to construct for themselves we must look and to appreciate the jouissance of suffering to which this being yet binds contemporary African Americans,

to the function of religion in slavery Because efforts during slavery to resignify race were especially
.

open to contention, enslaved blacks were slow to embrace race truly as a source of being. the And so, in truth,

nascent African American identity that began to cohere in times of slavery more often employed religion
both to contend against and to positively resignify race in an effort to constitute this being, thus setting
the stage for an emphasis on religion in African American culture that is yet present today in . What we find

slavery the unity developed by enslaved blacks emerged not primarily because of a sense of their
is that

“racial” commonality but because blacks were bound together by a common circumstance that both accentuated existing similarities across the group and demanded this unification as a source of resistance and a means of survival.100 More likely to

, individual slaves formed alliances and group affiliations that

recognize differences within the racial group than the masters who asserted the power to define the group

were more nuanced than any allowed by the category of race. The slave narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, who spends much of his enslavement on a merchant ship
before landing in New York City, supports this point, displaying the internal differences among slaves that prevented their easy unification around race as a source of being. Gronniosaw’s inability to identify with the other slaves in his new master’s household not only leads to his
conviction that the “servants were all jealous, and envied [him] the regard, and favour, shewn [him] by [his] master” but also facilitates his construction of a narrative that asserts God will not save Gronniosaw’s fellow blacks or “those born under every outward Disadvantage, and in
Regions of the grossest Darkness and Ignorance” if they lack “knowledge of the [biblical] Truth.”101 Written after he is freed and no longer has even the common circumstance of a mutual enslavement to link him to the larger slave community, Gronniosaw’s narrative seeks support not
for members of this community but for his own starving family in dire need of money. Gronniosaw’s narrative maintains that through the bondage under which members of his race still exist, the “Lord undertook to bring” Gronniosaw “out of Darkness into His marvelous light.”102 What
Gronniosaw’s religious rhetoric shows is that race by itself could not unify slaves or fully promise them being; functioning at times in direct opposition to race, within and beyond slave communities, it was primarily religion that made this promise. Such a focus by slaves like Gronniosaw on
religion as the source of the object a that grounded being must be read within the context of a broader slaveholding society that celebrated the Christian view of God as the Supreme Being, a view expressed in the biblical statement “I am the one who is,” by which, Lacan notes, “God

From this Lacanian perspective, we may read

asserts his identity with Being.”103 The object a, Lacan shows, is that which presents itself as not just a semblance of being but also being’s “remainder.”104

the a as the source of the soul that, for the Christians to whom Gronniosaw addresses his narrative, links
mankind to the true Supreme Being; this a functions as the divine remnant at the core of man, the
spiritual essence, shaped by God’s own hands, that transcends man’s earthly existence. Both within man and external to man, this
extimate core as object a is what sets man on the path of a true love of his neighbor as the self. It is the source of a kind of love that Lacan calls “soul loving,” whereby subjects “love each other as the same in the Other,” aiming this love at the extimate object a that is both absent from
the self and illusorily present in the other.105 Where Gronniosaw wishes to establish the similarity of his soul to that of his white reader’s through use of his religious rhetoric, he struggles against a racism that functions to define his core self as blackened by the absence of God’s light, as
devoid of the soul’s divine spark. This struggle emerges because the soul loving he beseeches of the white other is equally, I would argue, the root of race love, whereby individuals of the same race come to love each other as mirrored images of the self, finding in each other the same
object the self pursues, the object belonging to the self that is absent from the self. This absence fuels a desire for racial unification and solidarity that stands at odds with the universalism ostensibly glorified by religious soul loving of the neighbor. I will show in chapters 2 and 3 how

race comes to supplant religion as a source of this core object a that offers African Americans a
semblance of being, but what we find in Gronniosaw’s narrative is race as an impediment to any loving
of the neighbor’s soul Within slavery, race both obstructed cross-racial unity and impaired creation of an
.

extimate object a capable of unifying blacks intersubjectively into a group identity Because race was the .

root of slavery’s assertion of the nonbeing of the slave, race had to be redefined and buttressed by
religion for it to function as a source of being. Not only religion but also communal activities like group
worship or singing and working together all helped to create the unified group to which this being could
be assigned.106 Establishing unity through communal activity, religion and spiritual slave songs were
especially important to both the reformation of slave identity and the gradual development of notions
of race as possible sources of being. Emblematic of this fact is Lawrence Levine’s observation that “the single most persistent image of the slave songs is that of [African Americans as] the chosen people.”107

Through attempting to supplant the authority of the slave master with that of God, slaves sought to
recast the veil of fantasy over the psychic place of lack uncovered by the institution of slavery. Religion
became the source of a fantasy grounded more in the patriarchs of the Old Testament than in race,
allowing for identification with heroes like Moses, Joshua, Jonah, and Noah, who were delivered from
their own suffering and that of the world around them. Through such fantasies, the slave’s suffering
could be contextualized as proof of a unique access to being, as proof of one’s divine selection for
salvation. This is precisely what we see in Gronniosaw, who asserts, “I am willing, and even desirous of being counted as nothing,” for “I know that . . . every trial and trouble that I’ve met with . . . [has] been sanctified to me.”108 Gronniosaw takes the concept of the
chosen to its extreme, articulating his worthiness of financial aid from others through a demonstration of his position of distinction from all sinners, white and black. Seeking to constitute himself as a chosen one by rhetorically severing this religiously sanctified self from established
notions of race, Gronniosaw simultaneously distances himself particularly from other blacks because he realizes that as race augments the notion itself of a group identity it also implicitly contests the fantasies religion allows. Though these revivifying religious fantasies of being often
promised salvation in this world, and not just the next, the limits of the agency they covenanted were displayed in the ability of slave masters to themselves bind race to religion in order to justify notions of white supremacy. Such biblical events as Noah’s cursing of the descendants of his
son Ham to forever become the servants of all other men were significant to this process. Through this story, whites could not only promote the association of blacks with Ham, whose name “is a vulgarization of Cham,” or ch’m, the Hebrew word for black, but also present black skin as

What we see through such contention

the sign of a servitude and cursed suffering that was divinely sanctioned.109 This suffering, bound to race, is merely the obverse of that constructed in the rhetoric of Gronniosaw.

over race and suffering is that African Americans encounter continuous obstacles in the construction of
their fantasy of being through reliance upon the apparatus of race. Because race as object a today still
remains discursively tied to the trauma it attempted to compensate for in slavery, African American
identity ever circles this traumatic past, defined by a suffering that the concept of racial identity
alternately attempts to alleviate and traumatically unfurls. As Lacan notes, “There is nothing more difficult than separating a word from discourse. . . . As soon as you begin at this level,

Still able to function as a stigma for African Americans, what the word “race” marks
the whole discourse comes running after you.”110

is a fantasy difference that not only discursively justified the master’s brutal and traumatic scarring of
the slave’s flesh and psyche but also still today repeats its long historical function of signifying the lack
of some quality needed to make African Americans the equals of whites . It is therefore no surprise that
the process initiated by slaves of forming for blacks a protective group identity demanded the unifying
function of music and communal activities like religious worship, and could not rely solely upon the
efforts to resignify race , African American racial identity
that we see praised by African American academics like Gates and Baker. As scholars such as Ron Eyerman have demonstrated

could only be truly solidified as a discursive concept after slavery ended, at the moment post-
Reconstruction when an emerging black middle class and intelligentsia had finally attained sufficient
levels of agency over discourse to employ race in calls for political unity While most African American .111

scholarship repeats endlessly this early attempt by the intelligentsia and the slaves themselves to
resignify and politically redeploy race, Trauma and Race suggests a need finally to advance beyond mere
resignification. What resignification today entails is an ambivalent scholarly desire to maintain race
that is actively facilitated by conceptualizations of agency and identity as discursive, a desire to
uphold race while also depriving it of a lethal essentialism that is often the core of racism . This
ambivalence suggests race’s position not only as a fantasy object, or object a, but also as a Symbolic
remnant, as a link— often willfully preserved by scholars—to the traumatic Real of slavery’s jouissance . By

Trauma and Race seeks to articulate a notion of agency and identity that distances itself from both
contrast,

race and the traumatic past it incorporates.

The affirmative presents race as biologically predating the Symbolic – this thesis is
fundamentally incorrect – race is a function of the Symbolic
George 16 [Sheldon George is a Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American
literature @ Simmons College. “Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity”.
Baylor University Press. P 39-41 SW]

is an effort to conserve race beyond its referential value and an attachment to race
What we find in both Du Bois and Outlaw, I suggest,

that extends beyond the logic is a dogged belief that, despite the conceded
of these individuals’ arguments. Part of the reason for this adherence to race

lack of scientific basis for race, this concept does indeed have some perceivable referential value. Du
Bois himself argues that a “scientific definition of race is impossible,” for “physical characteristics are not
so inherited as to make it possible to divide the world into races.”10 But race asserts its existential
veracity through appeal to the eyes, through assertion of a natural and visible difference, marked in skin
color, that helps to seduce equally Du Bois and Outlaw into compliance with racial thinking. this It is

seductive visibility of race, this “common sense” evidence from “everyday life,” that we must first as Outlaw puts it,

come to terms with in understanding the compelling attachment to race maintained by African
Americans like Outlaw and Du Bois. Though race is a discursive construct, one that I argue is inspired by
psychic urgencies, race remains compelling to the eyes because racial differences emerge from a
grafting of the meanings of the Symbolic onto biology . It is this propensity of race to conflate the Symbolic’s discourses with biology that Du Bois and Outlaw promote in clustering race as both

Emerging from the intersection of biology and the Symbolic, race does not manufacture
sociohistorical and biological.

difference but instead structures a prescribed mode of interpretation that grants forms of existent
biological difference more critical Symbolic value. The biological fact of phenotypic variations functions in racial discourse as race’s alibi, masking the inherent arbitrariness of racial distinction by
internalizing and eternalizing difference as an embodied permanency. Because phenotypic differences in pigmentation and morphological variations in bone and hair are often traceable through ancestral lines, these visible differences provide an ostensive basis for a biological notion of
race as defined by inheritable characteristics. However, as the history of racial passing in this country attests, such characteristics do not always correlate in predictable ways with racial identity. Though, by grounding itself in the biology of phenotype, race comes to imply deeper

is the system of the Symbolic itself that grants race and these
dissimilarities in such things as morality, intellect, degrees of licentiousness, violent proclivities, and so on, it

implied dissimilarities their value, establishing a differential status that has meaning only within a
chain where black adopts its Symbolic significance through its interrelation with and distinction from
white Precisely by grafting itself onto biology, however, race presents itself as pre-dating the system of
.

the Symbolic, masquerading as an inherent component of nature indicative of visible, natural variations
in groups of humans. This ability to grant permanency to difference through biology is both what
enables race to function as the accomplice of psychic fantasies aimed at jouissance and what Outlaw
attempts to reinforce by defining race as a cluster concept. Though Outlaw contends that racism today is caused by “invidious conceptualizations of raciality and ethnicity” and that
therefore today “we desperately need . . . settled and widely shared knowledge” of “empirically and socially appropriate identification of persons and groups,” Outlaw does not embrace the cluster concept for its empirical or social appropriateness.12 Recognizing that race’s lack of
scientific grounding makes it a concept that will always be “subject to challenge and change,” Outlaw admittedly embraces the “cluster concept” definition of race for its fluidity and its ability to account for “variation across time and space”; he embraces this definition because it allows
him to maintain race and racial distinctions.13 We note most visibly the contradiction in Outlaw’s argument when he asserts that the “continued existence of discernible racial/ ethnic communities of meaning is highly desirable, even if, in the very next instance, racism and invidious
 race, though failing to define its referent, is yet needed to achieve “social
ethnocentrism in every form and manifestation were to disappear forever.”14 If

peace and harmony” in the face of invidious racism, why this compulsion to maintain race once racism
disappears forever? 15 It would seem that what Outlaw seeks is not to establish communities of meaning but to maintain racial communities forged by the memory of this very history of race and racism Outlaw seeks to overcome.

Slavery as a master signifier – leads to a fantasy of wholeness that can never be

fulfilled and grounds black identity in suffering
George 16 [Sheldon George is a Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American
literature @ Simmons College. “Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity”.
Baylor University Press. P 51-52 SW]

, it is the dominating substitute signifier that coheres

In such warfare structure to the sentimental mass of the and grants

signified Slavery as signifier comes to organize both desire and identity

. for Du Bois because slavery “crystallizes” his feelings and sense of self in what Lacan calls
a “dialectic that has as its centre a bad encounter.”58 In psychoanalysis, the bad encounter is a “traumatizing” confrontation in the life of the subject that assumes an “organizing function for development” because it produces an awareness of lack.59 In Du Bois’ case, however, the bad

Slavery allows for the historicizing and depersonalizing of both

encounter of slavery that organizes his personal biography is external to his biographical experiences. , thus,

being and lack This historicizing becomes possible because the racism of slavery that attempted to
for Du Bois.

elide the being of slaves by pinning subjective lack exclusively to them also produced slavery as a central
historical representative of subjective lack Racial identity itself whether imposed or for later generations of African Americans. , by racism

willfully embraced as the historical context for self-understanding and being not only
by contemporary African Americans ,

crystallizes for African Americans the indisputable link between slavery and the racism they continue to
suffer but also may collapse their personal sense of being with the historical lack emerging from slavery.
Racism is key to this conflation racism grounds the African
. In repeating a process whereby the African American subject’s relation to being is again questioned, as it was in slavery,

American subject’s psychic sense of lack not in the split self but in the racial past. This crystallization of identity through the bad encounter of

Lacan ties the subject’s loss of

slavery is therefore what redefines Du Bois’ own desires by obfuscating lack. Du Bois models the process by which slavery and racial identity may displace African Americans’ relation to both lack and being.

being to the exclusion from the Symbolic of those aspects of the subject that defy linguistic
circumscription, the drives and desires of the subject that evade representation even in the very process
of the subject’s articulation of his or her demands. The root of these core drives and desires is the libido as “an internal” tension, a “constant force” that registers what the “sexed being loses in
sexuality” upon entrance into the Symbolic.60 Initially “polymorphous, aberrant,” the emerging subject is able to attain pleasure through multiple sources, but sexuality and the signifier both step in to define the regions of the body and the objects of the Symbolic through which the
sexed subject may attain pleasure.61 As a result, the constant force of the libido achieves Symbolic expression only as “partial drives,” emerging with only “that part of sexuality that passes into the networks of the constitution of the subject, into the networks of the signifier.”62 As “the
most profound lost object,” the libido, manifested as an aphanisis of being, fuels desire and sexuality such that it is through pursuit of a mate that the subject attempts typically to compensate for lack, seeking out in love the person who possesses the illusory lost object that will fulfill him

African Americans who ground their identity primarily in race, relate to this
or her and make him or her, fantastically, whole again.63 However, like Du Bois,

fantasy of wholeness on a grander scale. As we see above, when he reaches the point of “ultra ‘race’ loyalty,” what compensates for lack in Du Bois is not a connection with a mate but membership in a larger race. In

desire is most directly grounded in the substitute signifier slavery that organizes the sentimental
this moment,

continuum away from personal lack and toward an external bad encounter that presents itself as a fixing
manifestation of loss for all members of the race. race itself becomes the illusory object Because slavery has so bound loss to race,

upon “which the drive closes” in its pursuit of wholeness love of the race becomes the .64 Beyond love of a mate,

primary means of curing whatever ails the subject and fulfilling all of Du Bois’ desires as he begins to define all lack and all suffering as racial.

White jouissance is only achieved through racialized ends. Empirical examples like the
shooting of Jordan Davis, prove how white people aim to fill the lack through racism.
George 2014 (George, Sheldon. Psychoanal Cult Soc (2014) 19: 360.
https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.36. DOA)

We begin to circumscribe the function of race with regard to this fantasy by inquiring into the source of
the cross-temporal resilience of notions of race in America. The relation, in particular, of African
Americans to race reveals a noticeable paradox. Though direct or indirect reference to race is the central
means through which discrimination of African Americans has been justified in America, African
Americans most often embrace the concept of their own racial identity. Emerging from the successes of
the Civil Rights Movement, an identity politics based on unification along racial lines continues to hold
sway for African Americans. Whatever credence they give to the existential value of race, African
Americans frequently argue for race’s value in a sort of poststructuralist approach to agency, whereby
the subject must seek to appropriate and redefine the signifiers that define the subject. This is the
approach extolled by renowned African American scholar Houston Baker, who declares that African
Americans should embrace a politics of “liberating manipulation” and “revolutionary renaming” (1989,
p. 25) that employs language as a “black defense against and revision of ancient terrors, mistaken
identities, dread losses” (2001, p. 5). What I suggest, however, is that race holds such appeal even for
African Americans because the losses against which it defends are not merely social, but also psychic.1
Adherence to race is directed by an effort to recover what I would call an illusion of being. Being is what
the subject loses of herself through entrance into the world of language that Lacan called the Symbolic.
Forced to exist within this Symbolic, the subject is alienated from her being, from all aspects of the self
that escape submission to the hermeneutics of the signifier in its ability to define and name the
subjective self that always extends beyond language. This self is what is mourned through a search for
the Lacanian object a, the fantasy object within the Symbolic, often pinned to the other as mate, that
promises the subject comple- tion. But it is also, I suggest, what is pinned to the racial other, as a living
medium through which fantasies of race articulate for the subject an illusory relation to being. In such
fantasies, the racial other can be constituted as comprised of a being totally different from the
subjective self. Lacan made the striking assertion that “a solid hatred is addressed to being” (1998a, p.
99). In the American Symbolic, structured by a history of racism, what urges subjects toward a process
of racial othering through use of ready-made fantasies of race is precisely the attempt to establish the
self’s and the other’s divergent relations to being. The subject most effectively establishes the other’s
relation to being by pinning fantastical meaning to the other’s perceived jouissance, or mode of
enjoyment – the pleasures and actions which may signal to subjects that this other has the a, the fantasy
object that grants completion. Inherent in the racism of today, I argue, is the recycling of signifiers of the
past that incorporate notions of African Americans’ relation to a distinctly different jouissance of being.
We see this, for example, in the recent shooting of Jordan Davis, an African American teenage boy who
was shot at ten times and killed by a white man named Michael Dunn because Davis and his friends
were parked in a gas station playing their rap music too loud for Dunn’s liking. Aiming his hatred at their
particular form of jouissance and arguing that “this gangster-rap, ghetto talking thug ‘culture’ that
certain segments of society flock to is intolerable” (February 20th), Dunn shot at the boys because, he
says, “the way they behaved” in response to his request that they turn down the music was
“obnoxious,” causing him to conclude that “everybody in the car was a thug or a gangster” (Trial, Day 5).
Admitting to possibly “imagining” that the boys had a gun, Dunn grounds his fears of the boys in
fantasies that define their jouissance as other, dangerous: he explains, “You know, you hear enough
news stories and you read about these things, they go through your mind” (Trial, Day 5). The circulation
of “these things” in the minds of Americans is rooted in a Symbolic that remains bound to signifiers of
the past that secured a sense of being for white Americans. The specific experience of slavery, I argue,
produced an eruptive surplus of illicit jouissance for white Americans, a surplus of pleasure that flooded
this past and still threatens to saturate the present. Where Lacan defined jouissance as fundamentally
“evil” for its unbending drive toward the bliss of being, jouissance designates a pleasure beyond the
Symbolic, one for which the subject will destroy both the self and the other who occupy this Symbolic
(1997, p. 184). It is by making jouissance accessible through the suffering body of the black racial other
that slavery produced a particular mode of enjoyment, a way of accessing pleasure that resounds in the
present. At the heart of this mode of jouissance is the oppression of black others whose supposed
inferiority secures for white Americans a notion of superiority and greater being. Where the a that
signals a relation to being is only imagined, jouissance as a visible mode of enjoyment that distinguishes
self from other, and racial group from racial group, functions as an index of being. But the fantasy a, this
“object that puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the other,” is the true source of this
other’s alterity (1998a, p. 63). Through the object a, race functions as what I would call, after Lacan, the
“para-being,” the “being beside,” which is “substitute[d]...for the being that would take flight” (p. 44).
This para-being is what Lacan linked to a notion of the soul. Where in the Western tradition the
association of supreme being with God is expressed in the biblical statement, “‘I am the one who is,’ by
which God asserts his identity with Being,” the subject only achieves a sense of being through the
fantasy object a, the function of which is precisely to present itself as a “semblance of being,” as that
which “give[s] us the basis of being” (p. 95). The object a presents itself as a “remainder” (p. 6), a
remnant of the lost being, grounding itself as the source of the “soul” that links us to God (p. 84). In this
manner, we may read race as a form of what Lacan called “soul loving,” whereby individuals of the same
race “love each other as the same in the Other,” love each other as a mirrored self that contains the
very same object the subject is in pursuit of, the object belonging to the self but absent from the self (p.
85). This object, as a missing remnant of the self found in the other of the same race, constitutes, I
suggest, a fundamental essentialism inherent in race. At root, it is the notion of an essential fantasy
sameness, an illusory core-self identifiable in the other of the same race, that binds the subject to his or
her racial partner as complement. Such sameness, sought in the other, is rooted in what Lacan called the
extimacy of the self, the self’s constitution by the “extremity of [an] intimacy that is at the same time
excluded internally” (2013, p. 16).2 This internal exclusion of the subject is what is most fully embodied
by the unconscious as an intimate but external agency structured by the signifiers of the Symbolic. It is
thus the extimate unconscious that we must first isolate in our understanding of the psychic functions of
race.

Attempting to use race as a form of identity formation, binds the racial subject to an
unattainable object a. The affirmatives move towards political formation around
identity politics only reproduces the same structures they attempt to combat.
George 2014 (George, Sheldon. Psychoanal Cult Soc (2014) 19: 360.
https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.36. DOA)

Most important in this traversal of race is an essential recognition of the lack in the signifiers of the
Other, a recognition that the signifier does not capture the subject’s entire being. Especially apparent in
signifiers of race – like “black boy” –, there is always a left over, a part of the self that cannot emerge
fully through the racial signifiers’ subjective meanings. It is this very failure of the signifier that is
highlighted in Figure 1, wherein the circle of being designates an entire portion of the split subject that
exists in the Real and is only partially accessible through the unconscious. The first implication of the fact
that being is elided by the signifier’s meaning is that, as we have seen, the subject is thus petrified into a signifier
and simultaneously alienated from that part of the self that can be, but is not, signified by language, that part situated
in the unconscious, where being and signification overlap to create non-meaning. But more radical than this is the
implication that there is a part of the subject that is not available to the operations of the signifier but yet may
express itself through desire, the part that comprises the rest of the circle of being. As Lacan argued, desire is “the
metonymy of our being,” and the “channel in which desire is located is not simply that of the modulation of the
signifying chain” (1997, p. 321). This desire, I suggest, is what can facilitate an ethical separation of the S1 and S2,
creating critical distance from the signifier and opening up a space for the subject to access better that of the self
which escapes the signifier. If we return to Fanon’s Jean Veneuse, what we see is exactly a desire for abandonment
that escapes signification and indeed grants structure to the signifiers that define subjectivity, organizing them by
their effort to repress this desire. The escape of desire from the signifier is possible because the Lacanian subject is
not merely the subject of the signifier, who “appears in the field of the Other,” but also “the subject in the field of
the drive,” (1998b, p. 199), where desire functions as that which is “agitated in the drive” (p. 243). Characterized by
a “constant force,” a tension that is at odds with the homeostasis and delayed gratification promised by the signifier
(p. 164), the drive is “different from any stimulation coming from the outside world” because it is an “internal” force
(p. 164). It emerges from the libido as “pure life instinct,” “irrepressible” and “indestructible life” (p. 198). This
libido, manifesting itself most appropriately as that which “the sexed being loses in sexuality” (p. 197), is connected
to Freud’s notion of the subject as initially “polymorphous, aberrant,” able to attain pleasure from all sources, but as
subsequently forced to localize pleasure in the erogenous zones (p. 176). The signifier and the mores of the
Symbolic institute a homeostasis that restricts “sexuality,” as a manifestation of the force of the libido, into coming
“into play only in the form of partial drives” (p. 176), so that we “deal only with that part of sexuality that passes”
into “the networks of the signifier” (p. 177); but the force of this immortal libido insistently marks its presence at the
site of the “gaps that the distribution of the signifying investments sets up in the subject” (p. 180). We see this
insistence, for example, in parapraxis, as something slips through the network of the signifier, something emerging
from the “losage ◊,” from the unconscious as a gap that Lacan places “at the centre of any relation” between “reality
and the subject” (p. 181). It is because the force of what emerges from the unconscious in this movement outward
directs the subject to the Other that the drive holds particular importance to an understanding of race. What race
encourages through the Other is substitution of desire for the drive, as it petrifies the subject in a stagnant relation to
the fantasy object. The movement of the drive involves a “circular” path out from the gaps of subjectivity toward the
Other and back to the subject (1998b, p. 178). In the place of the Other, the drive encounters and closes in on “the
petit a,” which is “in fact simply the presence of a hollow, a void” that “can be occupied by any object” but that
functions as representative of the “lost object” (p. 180). In the American Symbolic, I contend, the object a of
race, acquired from the Other, binds the racial subject to this circular path around a hollow that serves
as the source of identity. Unlike the path of desire, which involves a continual metonymic movement
from object to object in search of a source of satisfaction, the drive endlessly circles its illusive object,
“attaining its satisfaction without attaining its aim” (p. 179). While failing to attain the racial identity
represented by the object a of race, the subject of race yet still remains bound to the a because the a of
race becomes integral to the drive’s function not just of “making oneself seen,” but more fundamentally
of “making oneself” (p. 195). In encountering the object a defined by the Other, the subject acquires in
this object, in race, a “little mirror,” an “illusion” of self, to which the subject may “accommodate his
own image” (p. 159). We can say that in race the subject “assumes the role of the object,” embracing the
reversal whereby it is the jouissance and demands of the Other that are privileged (p. 185). But this static
objectification stifles the metonymy of desire. The fantasy object petrifying the self becomes the master
signifier through which a “primal” repression of being is achieved, and what is “built on” the signifier, as
we saw with Vaneuse, is “the symptom” of the subject, “constituted” as a “scaffolding of signifiers”
(1998b, p. 176). It is because of the satisfaction gained from the symptom, the jouissance and sense of
being granted by race as the soul or remnant of a lost being, that the drive need not reach its aim of
hitting the mark set by race as object a. This satisfaction is sustained as the source of a subjective self
with “nothing else” ensuring its “consistency except the object, as something that must be
circumvented,” something both aimed at and missed (p. 181). Lacan tied the pleasure of the symptom upheld
by the drive to a kind of autoeroticism that he described in the image of “a mouth sewn up” in “certain silences,”
closed “upon its own satisfaction” (p. 179). It is this closing up upon a jouissance of pain and pleasure, this
insertion into the self of the Other’s signifier, that I associate with race. However, Lacanian theory also
shows that “by snatching at its object, the drive learns in a sense that this is precisely not the way it will
be satisfied” (1998b, p. 167). I suggest that the existing ambivalence about race of both African Americans
and white Americans makes possible increased recognition that race does not produce the sovereign
humanness or supreme satisfaction that binds subjects to race as a fantasy source of being. Though the
extent to which recent events in America mark a permanent shift in relations to the signifiers of race is
yet to be seen, whiteness itself and the very value of race have been cynically questioned in the wake of
publicized incidents of “white”-on-“black” murders – like the shootings of Trayvon Martin by George
Zimmerman, and Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn – and police-on- “black” killings, like the death of Eric
Garner in an illegal chokehold by New York police who alleged he was unlawfully selling cigarettes.5 In
light of active protests in Missouri after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by police in the streets of Ferguson,
some have even argued optimistically that we are bearing witness to a “new civil rights movement which has sprung
up” (Ifill, 2014). Whether or not this movement comes to full fruition, it is precisely a process of bearing witness
that is key to its development thus far. What I suggest has occurred in the immediate aftermath of the killing
of these black men is a shift in many Americans’ scopic relation to the Other. At issue in this shift is the
gaze of the Other, which Lacan stated “has the effect of arresting movement” and halting transgression
(1998b, p. 118). What objectifies the subject, as the movement of his or her drive binds the subject to the
jouissance of the a, is subjection to an “entirely hidden gaze” of the Other, which the subject positions
as a policing authority for whom the subject performs his or her identity (p. 182). This disembodied
observer and judge constitutes an extimacy that polices unconscious desires, ensuring that “it is in the
space of the Other that [the subject] sees himself and the point from which he looks at himself is also in
that space” (p. 144). This space of the “capital Other,” Lacan said, is the “locus of speech,” the Symbolic
(p. 129). Where Lacan associated this locus with the law, the law of the father and the law of desire, it
can be said that this hidden gaze is often given presence by the police. Embodying the arresting gaze
that “surprises” the subject in his moment of transgression, the police should allow to arise “the
conflagration of shame” that realigns the subject’s desire away from the pathological object of his or her
fixation (p. 182). But while the police of Ferguson have facilitated an ostensive realignment of America’s
subjective relation to the object of race, they have done so by also largely dispossessing themselves of
the agency of the shaming gaze.

George indicts butler’s thesis of political planning. Butler’s poststructuralism fails

because understanding race as a performance, forecloses the opportunity to question
deeper drives.
George 2014 (George, Sheldon. Psychoanal Cult Soc (2014) 19: 360.
https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.36. DOA)

Though the ethical responsibility of issuing this challenge to the concept of race is ceded through the
glorification of the a, this responsibility is established even in the model of poststructuralism that holds
such sway over contempor- ary thinking about social change, wherein the ultimate aim of the theory is
not an essentialist but a strategic deployment of identity. In the poststructuralist vision, because the
given identity is “never fully owned,” it remains open to “urgent and expanding political purposes” that
demand shifting allegiances across such lines as race, class and gender (Butler, 1993, p. 228). But while
poststructuralism produces this politics driven by a metonymic shift in subjective positionality by
assuming a center-less self untethered from all identity, I envision through psychoanalysis the subject’s
encounter with an excluded center masked by the illusions of this subject’s embraced identities. Where
belief in race threatens to bind the subject to the fantasies of wholeness secured by the object a, and
where true poststructuralist resignification of race forecloses recognition of the deeper drives that guide
the identity politics of the individual subject, such a potentially seminal moment in the reconfiguration
of race offers the racialized subject a unique opportunity to attempt a Lacanian traversal of race that can
ground individual political activity in deeper recognition of the subject’s desire . Lacan specified that the
object a “plays the role of obturator,” inhibiting such recognition by facilitating the “closing of the unconscious”
(1998b, p. 144). Aimed at an impossible wholeness, what the object a of race attempts is to fill the
constitutive gaps in the subject, the spaces left unoccupied by the subject’s absent being. But Lacanian
theory stipulates that the “subject who has traversed the radical fantasy [can] experience the drive” that
exudes from the space of these gaps (p. 273). Where this drive is an expression of the undirected libido
whose “effective presence” is registered only in “desire,” it is through the process of reorienting one’s
desire away from such fantasies as race that the subject may begin the process of experiencing and
directing this internal tension of the drive (p. 153). Through the process of “mapping” one’s own desire in
one’s cynical questioning of the object a presented by the Other (p. 273), the subject is placed upon the
“track of something that is specifically [her] business,” situating herself in relation to a desire and drive
that is particularly her own belonging (1997, p. 319). It is perhaps most likely that the recent attention to
repeated incidents of deadly violence to black men will not produce sustained social skepticism about
the value of race, for “the loop” of the fundamental fantasy, Lacan stressed, “must be run through
several times” if the subject is to free himself truly from the illusions of the Other. However, the
unconscious gap opened up by this cynical response to race at the national level allows essential space
for the initial movements of the individual subject of race along the path of this loop.
Impacts
 Zero solvency
The aff sexualizes the impact while different partial drives continue their circular, self-
perpetuating activity—the plan never really solves because it is infinitely regressive
Zupančič 8 [Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis?: Three Interventions. NSU Press, 2008. p. 7-11] KA
Freud starts with the discussion of ‘sexual aberrations’ that were identified as such in the existing corpus of medical knowledge: homosexuality, sodomy, paedophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and so on. In discussing these ‘perversions’ and the mechanisms involved in
them (basically the deviations in respect of the sexual object, which is supposed to be an adult person of the opposite sex, and deviations in respect of the sexual aim – supposedly reproduction) Freud’s argument simultaneously moves in two directions. On the one hand, he extensively
demonstrates how the ‘aberrant’ mechanisms involved in these practices are very much present in what is considered to be ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ sexual behaviour. Insofar as they well integrated in what is considered to be ‘normal’ sexuality, they are not viewed as perversions. They are
only considered as perverse aberrations if they become altogether independent of the ‘appropriate’ sexual object and of the supposed sexual aim, if they become autonomous in their fragmented, partial aims that serve no meaningful purpose. Freud would object, however, to the word

Drives are fragmented, partial, aimless and independent of their object to

‘become’ – and this constitutes the second, crucial line of his argument.

start with the sexual drive is in the first instance

. They do not become such due to some ulterior deviation. The deviation of drives is a constitutive deviation. Freud writes that “

independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be dues to its object’s attraction s.” 2 This is why “from the point of view of psychoanalysis,
the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature.” 3 The discovery of this constitutive and original deviation of drives (which is precisely what

the object small a

distinguishes them from instincts) will gradually lead to one of the major conceptual inventions of psychoanalysis, the concept of (objet petit a), as it was named by Lacan. To put it simply, object a will come to
name the other (the real object of the drive as “independent of its object
) .” But let us look at the origin of this concept in Freud’s observations. One of Freud’s main examples is
thumb-sucking, which he analyses as a manifestation of infantile sexuality (the existence of which was, for the first time, systematically pointed out by Freud, and which has met with strong resistance). In relation to the need for nourishment, to which it attaches itself at the outset, the
oral drive pursues an object different from food: it pursues (and aims at repeating) the very sensation of satisfaction produced in the region of the mouth during the act of nutrition. Oral satisfaction, which arose as a byproduct of the satisfying of the need for food, starts to function as an

the concept of the drive is not simply a concept

autonomous object of the drive, it moves away from its first object and lets itself be led into series of substitute objects. In other words, (and of its object)

of the deviation from a natural need, in human beings, all satisfaction of but something that casts a new and surprising light on the nature of human need as such:

a need allows, in principle, for another satisfaction to occur which tends to become independent and ,

self-perpetuating in pursuing and reproducing itself There is no natural need that would be . absolutely pure, i.e.

devoid of this surplus element which splits it from within This non-convergence of two . split, this interval or void, this original

different versant of the satisfaction is the very site of ground of human sexuality , for Freud, . This is a crucial point when it comes to understanding

sexual’ is not to be confused with ‘genital’

another important emphasis of Freud’s conceptualization of sexuality: ‘ . 4 The ‘genital sexual organization’ is far from being primordial or ‘natural’: it is a result, a product of
several stages of development, involving both the physiological maturation of the reproductive organs and cultural-symbolic parameters. It involves a unification of the originally heterogeneous, dispersed, always-already compound sexual drive, composed of different partial drives, such

it is always a
as looking, touching, licking, and so on. (“Since the original disposition is necessarily a complex one, the sexual drive itself must be something put together from various factors.” 5). The unification bears two major characteristics. Firstly,

somehow force and artificial unification it cannot be viewed simply as a natural teleological result of (

reproductive maturations And it is never really fully achieved or accomplished

). it never
secondly, , which is to say that

transforms the sexual drive into an organic Unity with all its components ultimately serving one and the ,

same Purpose human sexuality is thus paradoxical artificial naturalization of the originally de-
. The ‘normal,’ ‘healthy’

naturalised drives human

(de-naturalized in the sense of their departing from the ‘natural’ aims of self-preservation and/or the logic of a pure need as unaffected by another, supplementary satisfaction). One could even say that

sexuality is ‘sexual’ precisely insofar as the unification at stake the tying of all the drives to
(and not simply ‘reproduction ‘) ,

one single Purpose, never really works, but allow for different partial drives to continue their circular,
self-perpetuating activity . Freud introduced the concept of libido to refer to the quantum of energy at work in the specific, ‘declinational’ path of the drives, libido names the ‘energy’ involved in the processes of supplementary satisfaction, for
instance – to pursue the previous example – thumb-sucking, or consuming food beyond the biological needs of the body, for the sheer pleasure of exciting the mucous membrane. Freud insists that this energy/excitation is sexual, although “this sexual excitation is derived not from the so-
called sexual parts alone, but from all the bodily organs.” 6 This point is absolutely crucial, for it allows us to see in what sense Freud actually discovered (human) sexuality, and not simply emphasize it or ‘reduced’ everything to it. It is not that thumb-sucking or gourmandising are sexual
against the background of their supposed relationship to the excitation involved in sexual intercourse, on the contrary, if anything, they are sexual per se, and it is sexual intercourse which is properly sexual on account of being composed of different partial drives such as these (looking,
touching, licking, and so on). It is in relation to this Freudian stance that one can measure the significance of the stakes involved in his break with Carl Gustav Jung, as well as the genuine philosophical implications of Freud’s radical conceptual move, Jung adopted the Freudian notion of
the libido and, with a seemingly small modification, gave it an entirely different meaning, with Jung, libido becomes a psychical expression of a ‘vital energy,’ the origin of which is not solely sexual. In this perspective, libido is a general name for psychic energy, which is sexual only in
certain segments. Freud immediately saw how following this Jungian move would entail sacrificing “all that we have gained hitherto from psychoanalytic observation.” 7 With the term ‘libido’ Freud designates an original and irreducible unbalance of human nature. Every satisfaction of a
need brings with it the possibility of a supplementary satisfaction, deviating from the object and aim of a given demand while pursuing its own goal, thus constituting a seemingly dysfunctional detour. It is this detour, or the space which it opens up, that constitutes not only the field of the
catalogued ‘sexual aberrations,’; but also the ground, as well as the energy source, for what is generally referred to as human culture in its highest accomplishments. The generative source of culture is sexual in this precise sense of belonging to the supplementary satisfaction that serves

libido’
no immediate function and satisfies no immediate need. The image of human nature that follows from these Freudian conceptualisations is that of a split (and conflictual) nature, whereby ‘sexual’ refers to this very split. If Freud uses the term ‘ to refer to a certain field of

cannot designate the whole of energy since it is

‘energy,’ it is to refer to it as a surplus energy, and not to any kind of general energetic level involved in our lives. It (as Jung suggested),

precisely what makes this whole ‘not-whole.’ Sexual ‘energy’ is not an element that has its place within
the whole of human life there is no ‘natural’ or pre-established place of human
; the central point of Freud’s discovery was precisely that

sexuality that is constitutively out-of-its-place, fragmented and dispersed, it only exists in deviations
, the latter that

from ‘itself’ or its supposed natural object, and that sexuality is nothing other than this ‘out-of-
placeness’ of its constitutive satisfaction the sexual is not a substance to be . In other words, Freud’s fundamental move was to de-substantialise sexuality:

properly described and circumscribed; it is the very impossibility of its own circumscription or
delimitation Sexual is not a
. It can neither be completely separated from biological, organic needs and functions (since it originates within their realm, it starts off by inhabiting them), nor can it be simple reduced to them.

separate domain of human activity or life, and this why it can inhabit all the domains of human life. What
is, disturbing about the Freudian discovery is
was, and still not simple the emphasis on sexuality – this kind of resistance, indignant at psychoanalytical ‘obsession with dirty matters,’ was never the strongest one

the powerful resistance

and was soon marginalized by the progressive liberalism of morals. Much more disturbing was thesis concerning the always problematic and uncertain character of sexuality itself. Thus, even more (and the more dangerous
 from liberalism itself, promoting sexuality as a ‘natural activity,’ as something balanced,
form of revisionism) came

harmonic in itself, but thrown out of balance by an act of ‘necessary’ or ‘unnecessary’ repression (depending on how
liberal on pretends to be). If anything, this image of sexuality as something obvious and non-problematic in itself is directly opposed to the Freudian fundamental lesson which, put in Lacanian terms, could be formulated as follows: the Sexual does not exist. There is only the sexual that

we must reckon with the possibility that

insist/persists as a constitutive imbalance of the human being. Let me rest my case with one last quote from Freud: “It is my belief that, however strange it may sound,

something in the nature of the sexual drive itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete
satisfaction .” 8
 Infinite cycle of need
The aff sexualizes the impact while different partial drives continue their circular, self-
perpetuating activity—the plan never really solves because it is infinitely regressive
Zupančič 8 [Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis?: Three Interventions. NSU Press, 2008. p. 7-11] KA
Freud starts with the discussion of ‘sexual aberrations’ that were identified as such in the existing corpus of medical knowledge: homosexuality, sodomy, paedophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and so on. In discussing these ‘perversions’ and the mechanisms involved in
them (basically the deviations in respect of the sexual object, which is supposed to be an adult person of the opposite sex, and deviations in respect of the sexual aim – supposedly reproduction) Freud’s argument simultaneously moves in two directions. On the one hand, he extensively
demonstrates how the ‘aberrant’ mechanisms involved in these practices are very much present in what is considered to be ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ sexual behaviour. Insofar as they well integrated in what is considered to be ‘normal’ sexuality, they are not viewed as perversions. They are
only considered as perverse aberrations if they become altogether independent of the ‘appropriate’ sexual object and of the supposed sexual aim, if they become autonomous in their fragmented, partial aims that serve no meaningful purpose. Freud would object, however, to the word

Drives are fragmented, partial, aimless and independent of their object to

‘become’ – and this constitutes the second, crucial line of his argument.

start with the sexual drive is in the first instance

. They do not become such due to some ulterior deviation. The deviation of drives is a constitutive deviation. Freud writes that “

independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be dues to its object’s attraction s.” 2 This is why “from the point of view of psychoanalysis,
the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature.” 3 The discovery of this constitutive and original deviation of drives (which is precisely what

the object small a

distinguishes them from instincts) will gradually lead to one of the major conceptual inventions of psychoanalysis, the concept of (objet petit a), as it was named by Lacan. To put it simply, object a will come to
name the other (the real object of the drive as “independent of its object
) .” But let us look at the origin of this concept in Freud’s observations. One of Freud’s main examples is
thumb-sucking, which he analyses as a manifestation of infantile sexuality (the existence of which was, for the first time, systematically pointed out by Freud, and which has met with strong resistance). In relation to the need for nourishment, to which it attaches itself at the outset, the
oral drive pursues an object different from food: it pursues (and aims at repeating) the very sensation of satisfaction produced in the region of the mouth during the act of nutrition. Oral satisfaction, which arose as a byproduct of the satisfying of the need for food, starts to function as an

the concept of the drive is not simply a concept

autonomous object of the drive, it moves away from its first object and lets itself be led into series of substitute objects. In other words, (and of its object)

of the deviation from a natural need, in human beings, all satisfaction of but something that casts a new and surprising light on the nature of human need as such:

a need allows, in principle, for another satisfaction to occur which tends to become independent and ,

self-perpetuating in pursuing and reproducing itself There is no natural need that would be . absolutely pure, i.e.

devoid of this surplus element which splits it from within This non-convergence of two . split, this interval or void, this original

different versant of the satisfaction is the very site of ground of human sexuality , for Freud, . This is a crucial point when it comes to understanding

sexual’ is not to be confused with ‘genital’

another important emphasis of Freud’s conceptualization of sexuality: ‘ . 4 The ‘genital sexual organization’ is far from being primordial or ‘natural’: it is a result, a product of
several stages of development, involving both the physiological maturation of the reproductive organs and cultural-symbolic parameters. It involves a unification of the originally heterogeneous, dispersed, always-already compound sexual drive, composed of different partial drives, such

it is always a
as looking, touching, licking, and so on. (“Since the original disposition is necessarily a complex one, the sexual drive itself must be something put together from various factors.” 5). The unification bears two major characteristics. Firstly,

somehow force and artificial unification it cannot be viewed simply as a natural teleological result of (

reproductive maturations And it is never really fully achieved or accomplished

). it never
secondly, , which is to say that

transforms the sexual drive into an organic Unity with all its components ultimately serving one and the ,

same Purpose human sexuality is thus paradoxical artificial naturalization of the originally de-
. The ‘normal,’ ‘healthy’

naturalised drives human

(de-naturalized in the sense of their departing from the ‘natural’ aims of self-preservation and/or the logic of a pure need as unaffected by another, supplementary satisfaction). One could even say that

sexuality is ‘sexual’ precisely insofar as the unification at stake the tying of all the drives to
(and not simply ‘reproduction ‘) ,

one single Purpose, never really works, but allow for different partial drives to continue their circular,
self-perpetuating activity . Freud introduced the concept of libido to refer to the quantum of energy at work in the specific, ‘declinational’ path of the drives, libido names the ‘energy’ involved in the processes of supplementary satisfaction, for
instance – to pursue the previous example – thumb-sucking, or consuming food beyond the biological needs of the body, for the sheer pleasure of exciting the mucous membrane. Freud insists that this energy/excitation is sexual, although “this sexual excitation is derived not from the so-
called sexual parts alone, but from all the bodily organs.” 6 This point is absolutely crucial, for it allows us to see in what sense Freud actually discovered (human) sexuality, and not simply emphasize it or ‘reduced’ everything to it. It is not that thumb-sucking or gourmandising are sexual
against the background of their supposed relationship to the excitation involved in sexual intercourse, on the contrary, if anything, they are sexual per se, and it is sexual intercourse which is properly sexual on account of being composed of different partial drives such as these (looking,
touching, licking, and so on). It is in relation to this Freudian stance that one can measure the significance of the stakes involved in his break with Carl Gustav Jung, as well as the genuine philosophical implications of Freud’s radical conceptual move, Jung adopted the Freudian notion of
the libido and, with a seemingly small modification, gave it an entirely different meaning, with Jung, libido becomes a psychical expression of a ‘vital energy,’ the origin of which is not solely sexual. In this perspective, libido is a general name for psychic energy, which is sexual only in
certain segments. Freud immediately saw how following this Jungian move would entail sacrificing “all that we have gained hitherto from psychoanalytic observation.” 7 With the term ‘libido’ Freud designates an original and irreducible unbalance of human nature. Every satisfaction of a
need brings with it the possibility of a supplementary satisfaction, deviating from the object and aim of a given demand while pursuing its own goal, thus constituting a seemingly dysfunctional detour. It is this detour, or the space which it opens up, that constitutes not only the field of the
catalogued ‘sexual aberrations,’; but also the ground, as well as the energy source, for what is generally referred to as human culture in its highest accomplishments. The generative source of culture is sexual in this precise sense of belonging to the supplementary satisfaction that serves

libido’
no immediate function and satisfies no immediate need. The image of human nature that follows from these Freudian conceptualisations is that of a split (and conflictual) nature, whereby ‘sexual’ refers to this very split. If Freud uses the term ‘ to refer to a certain field of

cannot designate the whole of energy since it is

‘energy,’ it is to refer to it as a surplus energy, and not to any kind of general energetic level involved in our lives. It (as Jung suggested),

precisely what makes this whole ‘not-whole.’ Sexual ‘energy’ is not an element that has its place within
the whole of human life there is no ‘natural’ or pre-established place of human
; the central point of Freud’s discovery was precisely that

sexuality that is constitutively out-of-its-place, fragmented and dispersed, it only exists in deviations
, the latter that

from ‘itself’ or its supposed natural object, and that sexuality is nothing other than this ‘out-of-
placeness’ of its constitutive satisfaction the sexual is not a substance to be . In other words, Freud’s fundamental move was to de-substantialise sexuality:

properly described and circumscribed; it is the very impossibility of its own circumscription or
delimitation Sexual is not a
. It can neither be completely separated from biological, organic needs and functions (since it originates within their realm, it starts off by inhabiting them), nor can it be simple reduced to them.

separate domain of human activity or life, and this why it can inhabit all the domains of human life. What
is, disturbing about the Freudian discovery is
was, and still not simple the emphasis on sexuality – this kind of resistance, indignant at psychoanalytical ‘obsession with dirty matters,’ was never the strongest one

the powerful resistance

and was soon marginalized by the progressive liberalism of morals. Much more disturbing was thesis concerning the always problematic and uncertain character of sexuality itself. Thus, even more (and the more dangerous
 from liberalism itself, promoting sexuality as a ‘natural activity,’ as something balanced,
form of revisionism) ca me

harmonic in itself, but thrown out of balance by an act of ‘necessary’ or ‘unnecessary’ repression (depending on how
liberal on pretends to be). If anything, this image of sexuality as something obvious and non-problematic in itself is directly opposed to the Freudian fundamental lesson which, put in Lacanian terms, could be formulated as follows: the Sexual does not exist. There is only the sexual that

we must reckon with the possibility that

insist/persists as a constitutive imbalance of the human being. Let me rest my case with one last quote from Freud: “It is my belief that, however strange it may sound,

something in the nature of the sexual drive itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete
satisfaction .” 8

Getting swept off our feet by our fantasies ends with a harsh encounter that politics
cannot be controlled by us
Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis Stavrakakis has PhD degrees from the ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’
programme at the University of Essex, “Lacan and the Political”, p.64, 10/3/99) JK

symbolisation has the creative power to produce

The field of social construction and political reality is the field in which the symbolisation of this real is attempted. Chaitin is correct when asserting that

cultural identities, but at the cost of covering over the fundamental nothingness that forms its
a price,

foundation it is culture, not nature, that abhors a vacuum, above all that of its own contingency (Chaitin, 1996:4- 5),

of its ultimate inability to master and symbolise the impossible real: there is a structural lack in the
symbolic, which means that certain points of the real canít be symbolised in a definite manner The .

unmitigated real provokes anxiety, and this in turn gives rise to never-ending, defensive, imaginary
constructs all human productions [Society itself, culture, religion, science can be
(Verhaeghe, 1994:60). Following from this,

understood in the light of that structural failure of the symbolic in relationship to the real It is the (ibid.: 61).

moment of this failure, the moment of our encounter with the real, that is revealed as the moment of
the political par excellence It is the constitutivity of this moment in Lacanian psychoanalysis that
in our reading of Lacan.

proves our fantasmatic conception of the socio-political institution of society as a harmonious totality to
be no more than a mirage. It is this traumatic moment of the political qua encounter with the real that
initiates again and again a process of symbolisation, and initiates the ever-present hegemonic play
between different symbolisations of this real. This play leads to the emergence of politics, to the political
institution of a new social fantasy (or of many antagonistic fantasies engaged in a struggle for
hegemony) in the place of the dislocated one, and so on and so forth. In this light, Lacan’s insistence on the centrality of the real, especially in the latter part of his teaching, acquires major political
importance. Lacan himself, in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis uses noise and accident as metaphors or examples of our encounter with the real. It might be possible to add the political to this chain of equivalences. Lacan’s schema of socio-political life is
that of a play, an unending circular play between possibility and impossibility, between construction and destruction, representation and failure, articulation and dislocation, reality and the real, politics and the political.

The 1AC as a patient should be terminable – Yet their attempts at endless reform and
endless conquest results in the repetitious cycle within academia
Weisman 86 Avery, “Terminality and Interminable Psychoanalysis: An Incomplete Report”,
https://www.karger.com/Article/PDF/287923.

Having described what I consider the three major concepts that emerged from Project Omega, I want to
turn away now to psychoanalysis, especially with respect to the obscure relation that psychoanalysis in
theory and practice bears to the facts about death I have been considering .1 take a very personal interest
in the link between psychoanalysis and thanatology, es pecially when considering death and dying , since
for a long time, I did psychoanalysis alongside my work in Project Omega. I worried about the overlap
and carry-over of one part of my day to another. I was afraid, for example, that 1 might inadvertently
slant the substance of analytic hours and urge my pa tients to talk about death unnecessarily. On the
other hand, or in the other parts of my professional day, I was equally concerned about inadvertently
interpreting physical symptoms and disabilities as if they were psychologically motivated, and needed
just the right formulation. Self-serving illusions that even hallucinate data and conjure up findings are not
uncommon in any field where the investigator has a strong emotional stake. However, it is regularly met
within the psychological domain where investigators can readily find what they are looking for, and
construe rather dubious data as supporting their original hypothesis. If you look in only one direction, it
is hard to see anything else. No one publishes nega tive findings; retractions are very rare in the literature
of science, and careers are not built by confirming the work of others. In all candor, I refrained - perhaps
too conscientiously - from pushing ideas about death onto my analytic patients. Naturally. I hoped to find
confirmation of my surmises, suppositions and hypotheses about the place of death-anxiety in the
mental life of healthy adults. Later, I did! But while listening daily to the usual psychodynamic bells and
buzzers alerting me to the approach of something significant, I tried not to be carried away. Instead. I
dwelt in the here-and-now, without too many eager surmises about terminality and death phantasies just
around the corner. The contrast between healthy psychoanalytic patients and the very sick patients I saw
at the hospital could hardly be more extreme. They shared few characteristics besides the obvious one of
lying down. For the preterminal patient, time is very limited, very alive. Concern about the future, conflict
about problems aside from the immediate now - all suspended. But at the other end of the clinical
spectrum, time has other significance for analytic patients. Time goes on and on, day after day. month
after month, even year after year. Concerns, conflicts and dilemmas are very much alive; time in the
sense of change is suspended. Time for a terminal patient can run out at a moment’s notice - almost.
Drastic changes in symptoms and physical status might take place over night. Again, in contrast, life in
the analytic format tends only to fluctuate on the vertical, not in the horizontal sense of finding abrupt
longitudinal changes. The analytic changes occur in the way that an emotional elevator moves up and
down, not like a continuous train of irreversible events. My point is this. Terminal patients can die almost
any time; time is tangible. For both analytic patients and the analyst, time is not only suspended, but the
atmosphere is such that gradually both feel exempt from the pressures, circumstances, events, and even
forces of outside life. Analysis constitutes a timeless universe of its own. Although many people -
analysts and analytic patients might refuse to admit that this is the case - time and the outside world are
insidiously excluded. It becomes very easy, and then easier still, to conjure up a kind of never-never land
where conflicts are old, yet still fresh today. People never age; all decisions can be postponed, and
conveniently relegated to the ‘perhaps’, ‘we’ll see’, and ‘let’s examine how it is that you feel that way’.
Everything exists as it always has, except in a diluted form. Traces of early life persist, phantasies shift,
fold, and repeat with almost undiminished regularity. The stream of consciousness never empties into
the sea; the journey goes on, endlessly. All this encourages a delusion of immor tality in which all
participants are implicitly exempted from the processes and pressures of aging, illness, accident, and
death

The negative’s analysis cannot be commodified as the analysis done by the 1NC is
represented by its use rather than its exchange value
Felman 82 “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable.” Yale
French Studies, no. 63, 1982, pp. 21–44. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2929829.
Teaching, thus, is not the transmission of ready-made knowledge, it is rather the creation of a new
condition of knowledge-the creation of an original learning-disposition. "What I teach you", says
Lacan, "does nothing other than express the condition thanks to which what Freud says is
possible" (S-Il, 368). The lesson, then, does not "teach" Freud: it teaches the "condition" which make
it possible to learn Freud-the condition which makes possible Freud's teaching. What is this
condition? In analysis, what sets in motion the psychoanalytical apprenticeship is the peculiar
pedagogical structure of the analytic situation. The analysis speaks to the analyst, whom he endows with
the authority of the one who possesses knowledge-knowledge of what is precisely lacking in the
analysis’ own knowledge. The analyst, however, knows nothing of the sort. His only competence,
insists Lacan, lies in "what I would call textual knowledge, so as to oppose it to the referential
notion which only masks it" (Scilicet I, 21). Textual knowledge-the very stuff the literature
teacher is supposed to deal in-is knowledge of the functioning of language, of symbolic
structures, of the signifier, knowledge at once derived from-and directed towards-interpreta-
tion. But such knowledge cannot be acquired (or possessed) once and for all: each case, each text, has
its own specific, singular symbolic functioning, and requires thus a different-an original-interpretation.
The analysts, says Lacan, are "those who share this knowledge only at the price, on the condition of their
not being able to exchange it" (Scilicet I, 59). Analytic (textual) knowledge cannot be exchanged, it
has to be used-and used in each case differently, according to the singularity of the case, according to
the specificity of the text. Textual (or analytic) knowledge is, in other words, that peculiarly specific
knowledge which, unlike any commodity, is subsumed by its use value, having no exchange value
whatsoever"s. Analysis has thus no use for ready-made interpretations, for knowledge given in
advance. Lacan insists on "the insistence with which Freud recommends to us to approach each
new case as if we had never learnt anything from his first interpretations" (Scilicet, I, 20). "What
the analyst must know," concludes Lacan, "is how to ignore what he knows." Each case is thus,
for the analyst as well as for the patient, a new apprentice- ship. "If it's true that our knowledge
comes to the rescue of the patient's ignorance, it is not less true that, for our part, we, too, are
plunged in ignorance" (S-I, 78). While the analysand is obviously ignorant of his own
unconscious, the analyst is doubly ignorant: pedagogically ignorant of his suspended (given)
knowledge; actually ignorant of the very knowledge the analysand presumes him to possess of
his own (the analysand's) unconscious: knowledge of the very knowledge he-the patient-lacks.
In what way does knowledge, then, emerge in and from the analytic situation? Through the
analytic dialogue the analyst, indeed, has first to learn where to situate the ignorance: where his
own textual knowledge is resisted. It is, however, out of this resistance, out of the patient's
active ignorance, out of the patient's speech which says much more than it itself knows, that the
analyst will come to learn the patient's own unconscious knowledge, that knowledge which is
inaccessible to itself because it cannot tolerate knowing that it knows; and it is the signifiers of
this constitutively a-reflexive knowledge coming from the patient that the analyst returns to the
patient from his different vantage point, from his non-reflexive, asymmetrical position as an
Other. Contrary to the traditional pedagogical dynamic, in which the teacher's question is
addressed to an answer from the other-from the student-which is totally reflexive, and expected,
"the true Other" says Lacan, "is the Other who gives the answer one does not expect" (S-II,
288). Coming from the Other, knowledge is, by definition, that which comes as a surprise, that
which is constitutively the return of a difference:

The 1AC as a patient attempts to teach their knowledge in an interminable standpoint

– This results in the 1AC subverting the violence described back onto itself
Nowhere else does Freud describe as keenly the revolutionary radicality of the very nature of the
teaching to be (practically and theoretically) derived from the originality of the psychoanalytical
experience. The analysand is qualified to be an analyst as of the point at which he understands his own
analysis to be inherently unfinished, incomplete, as of the point, that is, at which he settles into his own
didactic analysis-or his own analytical apprenticeship-as fundamentally interminable. It is, in other
words, as of the moment the student recognizes that learning has no term, that he can himself become
a teacher, assume the position of the teacher. But the position of the teacher is itself the position of the
one who learns, of the one who teaches nothing other than the way he learns. The subject of teaching is
interminably-a student; the subject of teaching is interminably-a learning. This is the most radical,
perhaps the most far-reaching insight psychoanalysis can give us into peda- gogy. Freud pushes this
original understanding of what pedagogy is to its logical limit. Speaking of the "defensive" tendency of
psychoanalysts "to divert the implications and demands of analysis from themselves (probably by
directing them on to other people)"-of the analysts' tendency, that is, "to withdraw from the critical and
corrective influence of analysis," as well as of the temptation of power threatening them in the very
exercise of their profession, Freud enjoins: Every analyst should periodically-at intervals of five years or
so-submit himself to analysis once more, without feeling ashamed of taking this step. This would mean,
then, that not only the therapeutic analysis of patients' but his own analysis would change from a
terminable into an interminable task. [Standard, XXIII, 249] 17. The therapeutic analysis of patients is
"interminable" to the extent that repression can never be totally lifted, only displaced. Cf. Freud's letter
to Fliess, dated April 16, 1900: " 'E's career as a patient has at last come to an end . .. His riddle is almost
completely solved, his condition is excellent ... At the moment a residue of his symptoms remains. I am
beginning to understand that the apparently interminable nature of the treatment is something
determined by law and is dependent on the transference." Hence, Freud speaks of "the asymptotic
termination of treatment." (Standard, XXIII, 215) Freud's italic. Of all Freud's followers, Lacan alone has
picked up on the radicality of Freud's pedagogical concern with didactic psychoanalysis, not just as a
subsidiary technical, pragmatic question (how should analysts be trained?), but as a major theoretical
concern, as a major pedagogical investigation crucial to the very innovation, to the very revolutionary
core of psychoanalytic insight. The highly peculiar and surprising style of Lacan's own teaching-prac- tice
is, indeed, an answer to, a follow-up on, Freud's ultimate suggestion-in Lacan's words-"to make
psychoanalysis and education (training) collapse into each other" (E 459). This is the thrust of Lacan's
original endeavor both as psychoanalyst and as teacher: "in the field of psychoanalysis," he writes,
"what is necessary is the restoration of the identical status of didactic psychoanalysis and of the teaching
of psychoanalysis, in their common scientific opening" (E 236). As a result of this conception, Lacan
considers not just the practical analyses which he-as analyst-directs, but his own public teaching, his
own seminar-primarily directed towards the (psychoanalytical) training of ana- lysts-as partaking of
didactic psychoanalysis, as itself, thus, analytically didactic and didactically analytical, in a new and
radical way. "How can what psychoanalysis teaches us be taught?" (E 439)-Only by continuing, in one's
own teaching, one's own interminable didactic analysis. Lacan has willingly transformed himself into the
analysand of his Seminar'8 so as to teach, precisely, psychoanalysis as teaching, and teaching as psycho-
analysis. Psychoanalysis as teaching, and teaching as psychoanalysis, radically subvert the demarcation-
line, the clear-cut opposition between the analyst and the analysand, between the teacher and the
student (or the learner)- showing that what counts, in both cases, is precisely the transition, the
struggle-filled passage from one position to the other. But the passage is itself interminable; it can never
be crossed once and for all: "The psychoanalytic act has but to falter slightly, and it is the analyst who
becomes the analysand" (Scilicet I, 47). Lacan denounces, thus, "the reactionary principle" of the
professional belief in "the duality of the one who suffers and the one who cures," in "the opposition
between the one who knows and the one who does not know.. . . The most corrupting of comforts is
intellectual comfort, just as one's worst corruption is the belief that one is better" (E 403). Lacan's well-
known polemical and controversial stance-his critique of psychoanalysis-itself partakes, then, of his
understanding of the pedagogical imperative of didactic psychoanalysis. Lacan's original endeavor is to
submit the whole discipline of psychoanalysis to what Freud called "the critical and corrective influence
of analysis" (Standard, XXIII, 249). Lacan, in other words, is the first to understand that the
psychoanalytic discipline is an unprece- dented one in that its teaching does not just reflect upon
itself, but turns back upon itself so as to subvert itself, and truly teaches only insofar as it subverts
itself. Psychoanalytic teaching is pedagogically unique in that it is inherently, interminably, self-critical.
Lacan's amazing pedagogical performance thus sets forth the unparalleled example of a teaching whose
fecundity is tied up, paradoxically enough, with the inexhaustibility-the interminability-of its self-critical
potential.
 Scapegoating
The repression of the death drive creates a politics of utopia sustained by the
scapegoating of communities that do not fall into the boundaries of their harmonious
world, incarceration, and genocide.
Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis Stavrakakis has PhD degrees from the ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’
programme at the University of Essex, “Lacan and the Political”, p.86-88, 10/3/99) JK

Our age is clearly an age of social fragmentation, political disenchantment and open cynicism
characterised by the decline of the political mutations of modern universalism that, by replacing God
with Reason, reoccupied the ground of a pre-modern aspiration to fully represent and master the
essence and the totality of the real. On the political level this universalist fantasy took the form of a
series of utopian constructions of a reconciled future society. The fragmentation of our present social terrain and cultural milieu entails the collapse of such grandiose fantasies.
1 Today, talk about utopia is usually characterised by a certain ambiguity. For some, of course, utopian constructions are still seen as positive results of human creativity in the socio-political sphere: utopia is the expression of a desire for a better way of being (Levitas, 1990:8). Other, more
suspicious views, such as the one expressed in Marie Berneriís book Journey through Utopia, warn of taking into account experiences like the Second World War of the dangers entailed in trusting the idea of a perfect, ordered and regimented world. For some, instead of being how can

It is particularly the
we realise our utopias? í, the crucial question has become how can we prevent their final realisation?. [How can] we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309). 2

political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation of utopian sensibilities and
brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all
grandiose political projects and the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them All (Whitebook, 1995:75).

these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary leave politics without its , seem however to

prime motivating force: the politics of today is a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a
result of the crisis in the dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way. 3 In this chapter, I will try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our
historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its suffocating strait-jacket. Letís start our exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to be regretted or cherished? In

it seems that the need for utopian meaning arises

order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all

in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict, when the element of the political
subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave .

antagonisms and dislocations in the social field all utopias strive to negate the negative…in . As Tillich has put it ‘

human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary’ (Tillich in Levitas,
1990:103). Utopia then is one of the possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of More’s Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an answer to the negativity inherent in concrete political

Utopias are images of future human communities in which these antagonisms

antagonism. What is, however, the exact nature of this response?

and the dislocations fuelling them will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and (the element of the political)

harmonious world —it is not a coincidence that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community ‘Harmony’ and that the name of the Owenite utopian community in the New World was ‘New Harmony’. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an
imaginary resolution to social contradiction; it is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try

every utopian fantasy construction needs a

to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument will be that

‘scapegoat’ in order to constitute itself—the Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the ‘Jew’ is a
good example Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination
, especially as pointed out in Žižek’s analysis.4 . Put

the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need
another way,

for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivety—and also the danger—of utopian structures is revealed when
the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel
of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination . It is inscribed in the structure of . This is not an accident

utopian constructions; if utopia is based on the expulsion

it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated,

and repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to
violence; it is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What

it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy

we shall argue is that . To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is ‘driven out through the door comes
back through the window’ (is not this a ‘precursor’ of Lacan’s dictum that ‘what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real’?—VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding
the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operation—here the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in

analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly
functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958). In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of
representing and making sense of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohn’s schema we can encounter the three basic characteristics of utopian fantasies that we have already singled out: first, their link

. Since human experience is a continuous battle with the unexpected there is always
to instances of disorder, to the element of negativity

a need to represent and master this unexpected, to transform disorder to order. Second, this
representation is usually articulated as a total and universal representation, a promise of absolute
mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A future utopian state is envisaged in
which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation produces its own remainder; there is
always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal schema It is to the existence of this evil .

agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is attributed. The elimination of disorder
depends then on the elimination of this group. The result is always horrible: persecution, massacres,
holocausts . Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever realised as a result of all these ‘crimes’—as mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our approach is the way in
which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europe’s Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b, 1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in
our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social phenomenon, the idea of purifying humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The contexts are, of course, different, but the urge
remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes together with the utopian mentality. It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back
to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of history (Cohn, 1993a:227).6 However, we will start our reading of Cohn’s work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient Rome: within the imperium, the Romans

Yet in the ancient Roman world, although Judaism was regarded

accused the Christians of cannibalism and the Jews were accused by Greeks of ritual murder and cannibalism.

as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a religion that was officially recognised. Things
were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian Eucharist could easily be
interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or even negated
the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived . It is not at all surprising then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of
conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or
an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the cry goes up at once: ‘Throw the Christians to the Lions!’. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity and to their relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated
many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians, the Fraticelli movement and the Cathars—all the groups appearing in Umberto Eco’s fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rose—were
later on persecuted within a similar discursive context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe

social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand,

had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226). In Cohn’s view then,

and millenarian exaltation, on the other, do overlap. When segments of the poor population were
mesmerised by a prophet, their understandable desire to improve their living conditions became
transfused with fantasies of a future community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic
massacre . The evil ones—variously identified with the Jews, the clergy or the rich—were to be exterminated; after which the Saints—i.e. the poor in question—would set up their kingdom, a realm without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:14–15) It was at times of acute
dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency was more present. When people were faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when they were faced with unfamiliar hazards dislocating their constructions of reality—when they encountered the
real—the collective flight into the world of demonology could occur more easily (ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence of millenarian fantasies. The vast majority of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn refers to the plagues that
generated the first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 1348–9, 1391 and 1400, the famines that preluded the first and second Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole wave of
millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282).7 It is perhaps striking that all the characteristics we have encountered up to now are also marking modern phenomena such as Nazi anti-Semitic utopianism. In fact, in the modern anti-Semitic fantasy the remnants of past demonological terrors are

The first condition of possibility for its

blended with anxieties and resentments emerging for the first time with modernity (Cohn, 1996:27). In structural terms the situation remains pretty much the same.

emergence is the dislocation of traditional forms of organising and making sense of society, a dislocation
inflicted by the increased hegemony of secularism, liberalism, socialism, industrialisation, etc. Faced
with such disorientating developments, people can very easily resort to a promise for the re-
establishment of a lost harmony Hitler proved successful in persuading the Germans that he
. Within such a context

was their only hope. collages exposing the dark kernel of National Socialism didn’t prove very
Heartfield’s genius

effective against Nazi propaganda . It was mass unemployment, misery and anxiety (especially of the middle classes) that led to Hitler’s hegemony, to the hegemony of the Nazi utopian promise. At the very time when German
society was turning into one of the great industrial powers of Europe, a land of factories and cities, technology and bureaucracy, many Germans were dreaming of an archaic world of Germanic peasants, organically linked by bonds of blood in a ‘natural’ community. Yet, as Cohn very

The emergence of the Jew as a

successfully points out, ‘such a view of the world requires an anti-figure, and this was supplied partly by the liberal West but also, and more effectively, by the Jews’ (Cohn, 1996:188).

modern antichrist follows directly from this structural necessity for an anti-figure. Rosenberg, Goebbels and other (virtually all) Nazi ideologues
used the phantom of the Jewish race as a lynch-pin binding the fears of the past and prospective victims of modernisation, which they articulated, and the ideal volkish society of the future which they proposed to create in order to forestall further advances of modernity. (Bauman,
1989:61) No doubt the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy is a revival, in a secularised form, of certain apocalyptic beliefs. There is clearly a connection between the famous forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the antichrist prophecy (Cohn, 1996:48). The Protocols
were first published by Nilus as part of his book The Great in the Small: Antichrist Considered as an Imminent Political Possibility and were published in 1917 with the title He is Near, At the Door…Here comes Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth. As the famous Nazi propagandist
Rosenberg points out ‘One of the advance signs of the coming struggle for the new organisation of the world is this understanding of the very nature of the demon which has caused our present downfall. Then the way will be open for a new age’ (Rosenberg in Cohn, 1996:217).

Within this schema the elimination of the antichrist, that is the Jews, is considered as the remedy for all
dislocations, the key to a new harmonious world Jews were seen as deserving death (and resented for .

that reason) because they stood between this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-
for world of tranquil happiness…the disappearance of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the
world of perfection . (Bauman, 1989:76) As Sartre claims, for the anti-Semite the Good itself is reduced to the destruction of Evil. Underneath the bitterness of the anti-Semite one can only reveal the optimistic belief that harmony will be reconstituted of
itself, once Evil is destroyed. When the mission of the anti-Semite as holy destroyer is fulfilled, the lost paradise will be re-established (Sartre, 1995:43–5).8 In Adorno’s words, ‘charging the Jews with all existing evils seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like a searchlight and to allow

for quick and all-comprising orientation…. It is the great Panacea…the key to everything’ (Adorno, 1993:311, my emphasis). Simply put, the elimination of the Jew is posited as the only thing
that can transform the Nazi dream to reality, the only thing that can realise utopia.9 As it is pointed out
by an American Nazi propagandist, ‘our problem is very simple. Get rid of the Jews and we’d be on the
way to Utopia tomorrow. The Jews are the root of all our trouble’ (True in Cohn, 1996:264, my emphasis). The same is, of course, true of Stalinism. Zygmunt Bauman brings the two cases together: Hitler’s and Stalin’s victims were not killed in
order to capture and colonise the territory they occupied…. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human world—
more efficient, more moral, more beautiful—could be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In both cases, a harmonious world, conflict free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled. (Bauman, 1989:93) In any case, one should not forget that the

In the study of
fact that the anti-figure in Nazi ideology came to be the Jew is not an essential but a contingent development. In principle, it could have been anyone. Any of us can be a substitute for the Jew. And this is not a mere theoretical possibility. ir classical

the authoritarian personality Theodor Adorno and his colleagues point out that ‘ subjects in our sample
find numerous other substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks’ (Adorno, 1993:303). Although the need for the
structural position of the anti-figure remains constant the identity of the ‘subject’ occupying that position is never given a priori. This does not mean that within a certain historical configuration with a particular social sedimentation and hegemonic structure all the possibilities are open to

Of course, the decision on who will eventually be stigmatised depends

the same extent; it means though that in principle nobody is excluded from being stigmatised.

largely on the availability within a particular social configuration of groups that can perform this role in
social fantasy, and this availability is socially constructed out of the existing materials . As Lacan points out in Anxiety,

although a lack or a void can be filled in several ways experience—and analytic experience— (in principle), , in fact,

shows that it is never actually filled in 99 different ways What we have is basically a play of (seminar of 21 November 1962). here

incarnation This play of incarnation is marking both the pole of the utopian fantasies and the pole of
.

the evil powers that stand between us and them . As Cohn concludes, Middle Ages prophecies had a deep effect on the political attitudes of the times. For people in the Middle Ages, the drama of the
Last Days was not a distant and hazy but an infallible prophecy which at any given moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment: In even the most unlikely reigns chroniclers tried to perceive that harmony among Christians, that triumph over misbelievers, that unparalleled plenty and
prosperity which were going to be the marks of the new Golden Age. When each time experience brought the inevitable disillusionment people merely imagined the glorious consummation postponed to the next reign. (Cohn, 1993c:35) But this fantasy cannot be separated by the coming
of the antichrist which was even more tensely awaited. Generation after generation of medieval people lived in continuous expectation of signs of the antichrist, and since these signs, as presented in the prophecies, included comets, plague, bad rulers, famine, etc. a similar play of
incarnation was played out in terms of determining the true face of the antichrist (ibid.).

Utopian fantasy is sustained by the necessary alien other who is then easily
scapegoated when the political project falls short of “expected” solvency
Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis Stavrakakis has PhD degrees from the ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’
programme at the University of Essex, “Lacan and the Political”, p.93-94, 10/3/99)

fantasy can only exist as the negation of real dislocation, as a negation of the
In the light of our theoretical framework,

generalised lack, the antagonism that crosses the field of the social. Fantasy negates the real by
promising to realise it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the
discursive nature of reality’s production. Yet any promise of absolute positivity the construction of an
imaginarised false real is founded on a violent/negative origin is sustained by the exclusion of a real a ; it

non-domesticated real which always returns to its place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to
a proliferation of negativity the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social order can only be
. As we have already pointed out,

sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder . Since the realisation of
the utopian fantasy is impossible, utopian discourse can remain hegemonically appealing only if it
attributes this impossibility that is to say, its own ultimate impossibility to an alien intruder. the As Sartre has put it

anti-Semite is in the unhappy position of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy (Sartre,

The impossibility of the Nazi utopia cannot be incorporated within utopian discourse. This truth is
1995:28).

not easy to admit; it is easier to attribute all negativity to the Jew: All that is bad in society (crises, wars,
famines, upheavals, and revolts) is imputable to him. The anti-Semite is afraid of discovering
directly or indirectly

that the world is ill- contrived, for then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the
result that man would be found to be the master of his own destinies, burdened with an agonising
and infinite responsibility. Thus he localises all the evil of the universe in the Jews we . (Sartre, 1995:40) 12 As Jerrold Post has pointed out,

are always bound to those we hate: We need enemies to keep our treasured and idealised selves
intact The fantasy of attaining a perfect harmonious world, of realising the
(Post, 1996:28-9). And this for fear of being free (Sartre, 1995:27).

universal, can only be sustained through the construction/localisation of a certain particularity which
cannot be assimilated but has to be eliminated. There exists a crucial dialectic between the
, instead, then

universal fantasy of utopia and the particularity of the always local enemy who is posited as negating it.
The result of this dialectic is always the same: The tragic paradox of utopianism has been that instead
of bringing about a system of final and permanent stability, it gave rise to utter restlessness, and
, as it promised,

in place of a reconciliation between human freedom and social cohesion, it brought totalitarian
coercion.
 War
Something about framing and the importance of feeling agential power otherwise
everything devolves into war. Alt solves case, root cause claim.
Caspary 93 (William R. Caspary. Emeritus Prof @ Washington University St. Louis. “New
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Causes of War”. Political Psychology Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp.
417-446https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3791706.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3A50c551456862fba8074476565edca67b SW)

Obedience to the commands and appeals of leaders and governments also

3. OBEDIENCE, POWERLESSNESS, AND GRANDIOSITY AND DESPAIR

appears to be related strongly to feelings of powerlessness. Citizens are often heard saying, "there's
nothing I can do about it," "my vote doesn't count," "the experts know best," and "no one listens to the
little guy." Feelings of powerless- ness can also lead to the seductiveness of vicarious experience of
power through identification with national military might and its use. Powerlessness is a real fact of
our own imperfect democracy, with its size and complexity, its unequal access to political influence, and
its consequent low levels of participation. But there is an additional factor of self-fulfilling perceptions of powerlessness-what Michael Lerner (1986) has called "surplus powerlessness." This surplus can be given
cultural and socioeconomic explanations, such as Lerner's. Psychoanalytic insights can supplement-not supplant-these accounts by illuminating early developmental origins of feelings of powerlessness which increase a person's susceptibility to disempowering cultural and social
influences. Clinical evidence on powerlessness, like splitting, has emerged from the widening scope of psychoanalytic treatment. The analyst who uncovers in the patient split images of good and evil parents is also likely to see indications of euphoric fantasies of power expressed in
grandiose projects and inflated self- images (Kernberg, 1975; Kohut, 1971; Winnicott, 1971). When reality punctures the balloon of grandiose fantasy, an underlying despairing feeling of helpless- ness-of being under the control of overwhelming powerful figures-emerges. It appears that
in this despairing, depressed state the person has little access to feelings of anger or grief that would give the self a sense of solidity and strength. If such feelings break through, the person is terrified of them and they are quickly repressed. The terror seems to involve both a fear of
outside punishment for having unacceptable feelings and a fear of inner disintegration because the intense feelings would shatter the fragile self. Having uncovered these patterns in more disturbed patients, it is now possible to recognize them in patients generally and to detect indirect
evidence in cultural materials of their presence in the population at large. Theoretically, and with the aid of evidence from parent-child observation and psychotherapy with children and so on (see above), we can reconstruct the developmental origins of these clinical findings as follows:
distress lets this be known in no uncertain terms. It will cry, kick and thrash, scream, and bite. Adult humans find these signals disturbing, and they typically respond by moving to diagnose and to minister to the child's need (Bowlby, 1969). We can conclude that this is adaptive behavior
on the child's part and has been selected for in the process of evolution. As for the child, when it obtains the expected and needed parental response, it is confirmed in the rightness of its needs and feelings and the efficacy of their expression (Miller, 1981). A basis is built for a s of

For some parents, however, the child's pain and anger are intolerable. They stir up feelings
personal power as an adult.

repressed since the parents' own childhoods, which they still are unable to handle (Fraiberg, 1980;
Miller, 1981). Even the child's joyful feelings may be resented, out of jealousy, or be simply
unacknowledged because of a parent's depressed state. Thus Finally, a narcissistic fantasy of being the perfect parent is disrupted if a child expresses needs and negative feelings.

parents may seek to suppress a child's feelings rather than to satisfy the underlying need. The child is commanded to cease crying.

The child learns an immediate lesson that it is

Directly or indirectly, the parents communi- cate that they will leave, or withdraw their affection, or commit violence if the child doesn't comply.

powerless to get its needs met. It learns to suppress its expressive behavior, robbing itself of the
instruments for personal power and for reality-testing about power in the future. Children are extraordinarily resilient and adaptive.

They develop other ways of coping. In particular they learn to be acutely sensitive to their parents'
desires and to perform in ways to satisfy those desires-thus extracting a mod- icum of recognition from
the parents and avoiding provoking their anger (Miller, 1981). These skills give the child a certain sense
of competence and control-of empowerment. These interpersonal skills may be of great use to this
same person later as an adult working in management, sales, helping professions, politics, and so on.
But such effectiveness has been purchased at the price of sacrificing the person's own needs in favor of
responsiveness to others. Underneath this surface competence and assurance will be a deep despairing
sense of powerless- ness. The political impact of such underlying dispositions and compensations is not
difficult to trace. Underlying feelings of personal powerlessness can easily amplify and distort feelings of
political powerlessness evoked by negative experi- ence in the political system. Passive obedience is
likely to ensue, but several other outcomes are also possible. Compensation by means of grandiose
fantasies can lend itself to alignment with grandiose national goals of conquest, invulnera- bility, and
superiority. Rebellious grandiose fantasies can lead to revolutionary projects that are absurdly out of
touch with realities. This results in self-defeating projects and a renewed despairing feeling of
powerlessness-on the part of sympathetic witnesses as well as participants. Michael Lerner (1986) sees
this as a dynamic in the 1960s New Left. Compensatory power through abnegation of one's own needs
and serving and/or manipulating others needs can be a basis for some political action and effectiveness
but is also vulnerable to self-defeating activity, both in internal organizational politics and in interaction
with larger political forces.
 Semiocap
Their adherence to racial signifiers produces the conditions for the performance of the
1AC to become new fuel for algorithmic capitalism- prefer the alternative
Bifo 17 [Francesco “Bifo” Berardi, The Second Coming, e-flux journal, #83, June 2017, //Stefan]
Depression can evolve in different ways: if you look at the present reality of America, you see that the
prevailing evolution of depression is Donald Trump. “The worst are full of passionate intensity,” says
Yeats. Faith in belonging and identity is the fake ground of passionate intensity. Belonging implies a
natural ontological or historical ground of conformity among individuals. This is why belonging implies
violence and submission. If you want to belong, you have to accept the rules of conformity. Identity is
the result of this process of conformity and subjection. Passionate intensity is the foundation of the
identity that humiliated people crave. But identity has to be protected against existence, against
transformation, against becoming, against pleasure, because pleasure is dis-identity. Identity is a
simulation of belonging that is asserted through violence against the other. “Surely the second coming is
at hand. / … a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight.” In 1919, Yeats expected the second
coming of Jesus Christ. However, in the decade that followed, Jesus Christ did not come back. Hitler
came. So we should ask: What is going to happen now? I’ll try to reframe the present situation from the
point of view of rhythm. In particular, I want to say something about algorithm and biorhythm. Rhythm
is the singularization of time. Rhythm is scanning time in attunement with cosmic breathing. Rhythm is
the vibration that aims to harmonize the singularity of breathing and the surrounding chaos. Poetry is
the error that leads to new continents of meaning. Although the theory of biorhythm elaborated by
Wilhelm Fliess at the end of the nineteenth century is generally considered pseudoscientific, I’m
interested in its metaphorical implications. The organism is composed of vibrant matter, and the
pulsations of the organism enter into a rhythmic relationship with the pulsations of other surrounding
organisms. The conjunction of conscious and sensitive organisms is a vibrating relationship: individual
organisms search for a common rhythm, a common emotional ground of understanding, and this search
is a sort of oscillation that results in a possible (or impossible) syntony. Within the conjunctive sphere of
biorhythm, the process of signification and interpretation is a vibrational process. When the process of
signification is penetrated by connective machines, it is reformatted. It mutates in a way that implies a
reduction: a reduction to the syntactic logic of the algorithm. The word “algorithm” comes from the
name of the Arabic mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (meaning, a native of Khwarazm), whose work
introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West. However, I prefer a different etymology and a
different meaning. “Algorithm” for me has to do with the Greek word algos, meaning pain. Furthermore,
the English word “algid” refers to frigidity, both physical and emotional. So I suggest that “algorithm”
has to do with frigidity and pain. This pain results from the constriction of the organism, the stiffening of
the vibrational agent of enunciation, and the reduction of the continuum of experience to the dictates of
computation. When the social concatenation is mediated by connective machines, human agency
undergoes a process of reformatting. No one really knows what human agency is, or what humans are
doing when they are said to perform as agents. In the face of every analysis, human agency remains
something of a mystery. If we don’t know just how it is that human agency operates, how can we be so
sure that the processes through which nonhumans make their mark are qualitatively different? An
assemblage owes its agentic capacity to the vitality of the materialities that constitute it. Something like
this congregational agency is called shi in Chinese tradition. Shi helps to illuminate something that is
usually difficult to capture in discourse: namely the kind of potential that originates not in human
initiative but instead results from the very disposition of things. Shi is the style, energy propensity,
trajectory, or élan inherent to a specific arrangement of things. Originally a word used in military
strategy, shi emerged in the description of a good general who must be able to read and then ride the
shi of a configuration of moods, winds, historical trends, and armaments: shi names the dynamic force
emanating from a spatio-temporal configuration rather than from any particular element within it … The
shi of an assemblage is vibratory.2 When the algorithm enters the realm of social concatenation, modes
of interaction undergo a reformatting process, and algorithmic logic pervades and subjugates the vibrant
concatenation. The insertion of the algorithm into the semiotic process breaks the continuum of
semiosis and life. In the connective domain, interpretation is reduced to the syntactical recognition of
discreet states. The vibrational sign is stiffened, to the point of losing the ability to decode and to
interpret ambiguousness and irony. Difference is then interpreted according to the rules of repetition,
and the indetermination that makes poetical misunderstanding (or hyper-understanding) possible is
cancelled. As the semiosphere is reformatted according to the algorithm, the vibratory nature of
biorhythm is suffocated. Breathing is banished from the semiotic exchange, and poetry—the error that
leads to the discovery of new continents of meaning, the excess that contains new imaginings and new
possibilities—is frozen. This is what Guattari called a chaosmic spasm.
 Academic Demography
Though seemingly radical in content, the aff mimics liberal multiculturalism on the
level of form- the presentation of the 1AC against the broader backdrop of the racial
Symbolic only serves to uphold that structure, allowing the university and false
narratives of inclusion to coopt their strategy
Viego 07 [Antonio Viego, Professor of Ethnic Studies @ Duke, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss
in Latino Studies, 2014, *brackets for gendered language* //Stefan]

A passage from the essay brings together several topics that I have been tracking throughout this
chapter, but I am mostly interested in the idea that Lacan develops regarding the ego psychologists’
reduction of their difference— which I read here as their Jewish ethnic and cultural difference—to their
function—as ‘‘managers of the soul’’—and in how we might read this idea in concert with Chow’s theory
of ‘‘coercive mimeticism.’’ This may resonate in our current situation concerning the ethnic-racialized
pedagogue’s role in teaching ‘‘difference,’’ managing souls, in contemporary multicultural and diversity-
driven U.S. university settings. Lacan writes: The shock waves were to reverberate to the very confines
of our world, echoing on a continent where it would be untrue to say that history loses its meaning,
since it is where history finds its limit. It would even be a mistake to think that history is absent there,
since, already several centuries in duration, it weighs all the more heavily there due to the gulf traced
out by its all-too-limited horizon. Rather it is where history is denied with a categorical will that gives
enterprises their style, that of cultural ahistoricism characteristic of the United States of North America.
This ahistoricism defines the assimilation required for one to be recognized there, in the society
constituted by this culture. It was to its summons that a group of emigrants had to respond; in order to
gain recognition, they could only stress their difference, but their function presupposed history at its
very core, their discipline being the one that had reconstructed the bridge between modern man and
ancient myths. The combination of circumstances was too strong and the opportunity too attractive for
them not to give in to the temptation to abandon the core in order to base function on difference. Let us
be clear about the nature of this temptation. It was neither that of ease nor that of profit. It is certainly
easier to efface the principles of a doctrine than the stigmata of one’s origins, and more profitable to
subordinate one’s function to demand. But to reduce one’s function to one’s difference in this case is to
give in to a mirage that is internal to the function itself, a mirage that grounds the function in this
difference. It is to return to the reactionary principle that covers over the duality of he who suffers and
he who heals with the opposition between he who knows and he who does not. How could they avoid
regarding this opposition as true when it is real and, on that basis, avoid slipping into becoming
managers of souls in a social context that demands such offices? The most corrupting of comforts is
intellectual comfort, just as the worst corruption is corruption of the best.∑π The ‘‘troika’’ sold out,
Lacan maintains, for recognition, for money; they confused recognition with the receipt of money. Still, I
find Lacan here uncharacteristically generous when he remarks that certain cultural factors were
working on the ego psychologists—‘‘This ahistoricism (characteristic of the United States) defines the
assimilation required for one to be recognized there, in the society constituted by this culture’’; ‘‘in
order to gain recognition, they could only stress their difference’’; ‘‘The combination of circumstances
was too strong and the opportunity too attractive’’; ‘‘How could they avoid . . . slipping into becoming
managers of souls in a social context that demands such offices?’’ When Chow writes, ‘‘the level at
which the ethnic person is expected to come to resemble what is recognizably ethnic . . . to resemble
and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them, a process in which they
are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the
familiar imaginings of them as ethnics’’ to diagnose a contemporary dilemma for ethnic-racialized
subjects in the United States, how can we not hear in it the same charge and diagnosis in Lacan’s
critique above: ‘‘But to reduce one’s function to one’s difference is to give in to a mirage that is internal
to the function itself, a mirage that grounds the function in this difference’’? If the culture of assimilation
in North America has changed somewhat in the time between Lacan’s remarks and Chow’s, it is with
respect to what is to be assimilated. Instead of the 1950s edict ‘‘turn white or disappear,’’ it’s more like
‘‘turn mottled or disappear’’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the United States. According
to both Lacan’s and Chow’s diagnoses, these coercive assimilatory imperatives operate on the condition
that the subject be confused with the ego and that whatever conflicts present themselves are to be
remedied with the strengthening of the ego. If Lacan can be said to link the confusion of the subject with
the ego in ego-psychological theory—the sine qua non, according to him, of the distortion of Freudian
theory—to certain North American assimilatory imperatives with which the ego psychologists had to
contend, then we can say that Chow illustrates the outcome of this confusion—of the subject with the
ego—in a contemporary situation as the price to be paid for ethnic-racialized subjects to be legible
subjects in the United States. In the passage from ‘‘The Freudian Thing,’’ we also have what qualifies as
a commentary on the ‘‘privileged marginal,’’ to use John Champagne’s resonant term: ‘‘privileged
members of cultural minorities whose disciplinary role is to contain the threat of a much more radical
deployment of difference that might destabilize homogeneous intellectual culture.’’∑∫ The ‘‘privileged
marginal’’ I have in mind, depending on the particular vicissitudes of his experience in an institution
where he has been entrusted with the task of disseminating the knowledge of cultural differences—for
example, as a representative of Latino studies—will have, no doubt, been coerced or compelled to
reduce [their] function to his difference. He sells out. [They need] the job. [They are] a diversity manager
of souls? A manager of diversified souls? A diversifier of managed souls? Prior to his involvement in the
university’s elaboration of the discourses on multiculturalism and diversity, what will be defined as
‘‘diversity’’ will have already been subjected to a kind of management, so that diversity, now inoculated,
can be dispersed and dispensed safely. The concern with safety comes from the desire to safeguard the
university from any real transformation in the politics of knowledge production that a more infectious,
more generatively noxious, unsafe notion of diversity might compel. How might the ‘‘privileged
marginal’’ subject craft more transgressive uses of her difference, to which [their] function has been
reduced, given that the dictates of ‘‘coercive mimeticism’’ have already worked her over in lending her
pedagogical authority to begin with? Lacan might be said to have at least once referred to something
like multiculturalism: ‘‘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 the Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not
imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.’’∑Ω Dylan Evans’s gloss on this
passage is revealing: ‘‘But as soon as we are forced to have recourse to the Other in order to mark the
position of our own jouissance . . . a curious paradox results. On the one hand, we need to preserve the
jouissance of the Other in order to be able to define our own; but on the other hand, we seek to destroy
that Other enjoyment because we suspect it may be more superabundant than our own.’’∏≠ We are left
with a vicious Imaginary a-dynamic: on the one hand, a ruthless refusal to grant psychical complexity to
ethnic-racialized subjects, which is to say, the refusal of the lack that generates desire and the subject’s
incalculability that springs from the human subject’s inscription in language, coupled with the weird
generosity— the compensatory psychical act of those in power—that offers a pure, riotous Beingness
followed by a kind of disgust and shame for the ethnic-racialized subject’s perceived unbounded
pleasure, which, in turn, necessitates strategies to circumscribe and destroy those very lives.
 Coercive Mimeticism
Specifically, that framing of race produces a standard of “recognizable ethnicity” that
results in forms of authenticity testing and color checking which outweigh and turn
the case
Gatzambide 14 [Daniel J. Gatzambide, adjunct lecturer @ Hunter, I’m not black, I’m not white, what
am I? The illusion of the color line, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 19(1), //Stefan]

What we often refer to as “the color line” between Black and White suddenly becomes a psycho-
political chess match, complete with the stereotypical black and white squares and pieces. Players forth
across the board. Depending on the context and content of the discussion, all that does not fit neatly
into a very specific category of what is “White” or what is “Black” is simply exchanged and lumped
together on the other side. In the case of some black men and women, they may be “Black,” but due to
the complexity and nuance of their experience, be deemed “not Black enough” and lumped in with
white people. Comedian, activist and political commentator Elon James White et al (2012) have
discussed how this process, which they call “blackchecking,” defines a distinct set of traits as
distinguishing what is “Black” from what is not. If – as an African American – the profile of your identity
does not fit within those coordinates, you are being something “not-Black.” The credibility of your
identity is then challenged. You don’t dress Black,” you don’t look, sound, taste, and act “Black .” Black-
checking, or “color-checking” more broadly, rages across the zigzagging twists and turns of the color-
line. Color-checking implies that at some level one can draw a clear and concise boundary between what
is an ethnic minority – and hence worthy of all the legal and social protections that entails – and what is
not. Nowhere is this clearer that in the case of non-African-American ethnic minorities. Middle-Eastern,
Asian, Southeast-Asian, Pacific-Islander, Latino/ Latin-American, African, Afro-Caribbean, and other non-
African-American minorities have faced histories of colonialism, egregious poverty, violence, as well as
social injustice within Western countries. At the same time, depending on context, various narratives of
social triumph or so-called “model minority” status have been articulated in order to digest these
minorities into the categories of whiteness and privilege. Take the case of Middle Eastern communities.
On the one hand, many Arabs are seen as falling into the category of “White,” according to the Federal
Government’s definition of what is “White” (United States Census Bureau, 2012). On the other hand,
Arabs, Persians, and also South Asians have been consistently vilified, persecuted, and oppressed in the
United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia and stereotyped as (non-White) terrorists threatening the
social order.1 The color line narrows and expands based on political necessity and psychological conflict,
constricting and suffocating us, leaving little air for complexity, nuance, or political and individual
freedom. I think of JJ, a teacher of Afro-Caribbean descent, who attended a workshop on racial biases in
education. She was interested in addressing discipline practices that disproportionately affected children
of color. JJ found herself in agreement with the speaker’s assessment of racial dynamics in schools and
society more broadly, but found the confrontational approach for dealing with White racial
obliviousness advocated in the workshop to be problematic. She voiced her agreement with the
speaker’s analysis of race, but also expressed her concern that the methods articulated for addressing
lack of awareness among whites might shut down dialogue instead of opening new lines of inquiry and
exploration. In response, JJ was accused of being “White-identified,” told that her parents “didn’t raise
her right,” and that she “wasn’t really Black.” She was either not Black enough, or told that her Afro-
Caribbean heritage – as opposed to being strictly African-American – had blinded her to the realities of
racism in the United States. I also think of Amy, a South Asian social work student. During her
participation in a cultural consciousness workshop, the ethnic minorities in the room were asked by the
group leader to sit in the center of the circle and discuss their experiences of discrimination and
mistreatment. This was intended as an exercise in which white students could learn from the
experiences of their peers of color. Over the course of the training, Amy noted that she felt conflicted.
On the one hand she could readily bring to awareness her own experiences with prejudice due to being
a Brown woman. Yet she also had an awareness of herself as economically privileged due to her family’s
class background. She verbalized this ambivalence to the group. The group leader responded that it was
not their job to help Amy feel comfortable. Amy clarified that this was not her intent – she was not
looking for comfort – but to expand the conversation in terms of different identities and levels of
privilege. Other Black group members commented on the conversation. Some believed that as a Brown
woman, a South-Asian woman, she wasn’t really a minority. Others said that Asians and Southeast
Asians were “model minorities” and basically White by association, and hence didn’t need any legal
protection from discrimination. Her presence in the group was in question. It almost seemed that so
long as her narrative was one of being a discriminated-against, underprivileged minority, she was an
ethnic minority. When she added complexity by noting how she was both underprivileged and
privileged, depending on whether one focused on her racial identity or her class status, she was color-
checked and judged to be White. These examples can be conceptualized in terms of in-group and out-
group dynamics, and there is certainly no lack of writing on this topic in the psychoanalytic and social
psychology literature. Important as these are, the perspective I am elucidating points us toward a
different angle of vision. Part of what I am talking about here is what the Lacanian Latino Studies scholar
Antonio Viego (2007) refers to as “coercive mimeticism,” an institutional and social practice whereby
there are certain ways in which ethnic minorities must act, believe, dress, and be in order to present
themselves as “recognizably ethnic,” as Latino-enough, as Black-enough, as Asian-enough, and so forth .
It is mimetic insofar as one has to look into the mirror of ethnic identity and adapt oneself to that image,
reproducing a very particular ego-identity, one that is often a poor fit to one’s more immediate
subjective experience. It is also coercive in that there are institutional, cultural, and societal pressures to
conform to that notion of identity i n order to find one’s place in the coordinates of race and ethnicity –
essentially, to be allotted a place on the color line. We are to take up our respective place on the
chessboard as Black or White, pawns in a much bigger and deadlier game. Here we can glean both the
imaginary and symbolic functions of racial object maps. These object maps provide coherence and
integration in the imaginary to an otherwise chaotic collection of signifiers – the racialized bodies in
which we exist. At the same time, racial object maps yield symbolic categories of me and not-me, Black
and White, and a language with which to organize and regulate closeness, distance, and racial desire.
Conversely, what is contained, or to be more precise, excluded, through the symbolic and imaginary
operations of the object map is the Real dimension of race – the ever shifting, anxiety-producing,
formless nature of the color line. When ambiguously ethnic subjects fail to see their image in the mirror,
when they are unable to play the language games of race and racial signification, there is a noticeable
discomfort and anxiety that sets in among those who partake in the production of coercive mimeticism.
The illusion of the color line comes into focus, disrupting how we see and define racialized bodies,
evoking the fragmented and uncoordinated nature of the child’s body prior to Lacan’s (2005a,b) mirror
stage. The illusion of wholeness, of being a whole body-ego – whether White, Black, or Brown – falters,
revealing the destitute, undifferentiated, and broken nature of race and racial identity. To survive the
encounter with the Real of race, I argue, paves the way for a unique kind of freedom. To give one
example, a Puerto Rican-ness is more malleable, flexible, and non-linear than one bound into one static
form and yields a fluidity that fosters experimental and novel ways of responding to oppression. This
fluidity at the same time can validate the ghosts of one’s ancestors while integrating their wisdom into
new, emancipatory potentialities. To be clear, I am not denying the importance of addressing colorism,
racism, and the privileging of white skin that exists in the Latino community and other ethnic minorities
(not to mention society as a whole). It is important for us to have that conversation, and point out how
notions of mestizaje, of hybridity in the Latino experience, may mask underlying tensions around race
and skin color, and render the relative privilege of light-skinned Latinos such as myself invisible. At the
same time, I am proposing that we also have a conversation that is perpendicular to a critique of racism
and colorism, intersecting with it but going towards a different vector. How we exclude one another
based on not meeting certain expectations about what it means to be Latino, Asian, Black, etc.,
threatens to disempower us further, limiting our political power by carving out a “minority of a
minority” as opposed to sustaining often difficult conversations about our sameness and difference.
Similarly, as Baratunde Thurston (2011) points out in his recent book, How to be Black, often this kind of
black-checking or color-checking narrows our vision of what it means to be Black (or Latino, or Asian,
etc.). Reflecting on his own sense of his Blackness, he writes, “One of the most consistent themes in my
own experience… is this notion of discovering your own Blackness by embracing the new, the different,
the uncommon, and, simply, yourself” (p. 218). Color-checking prevents us from experimenting with
different forms of dis-identification which enrich, challenge, and nourish us, and which hold the promise
of new forms of resistance, emancipation, and psychosocial revolt. As I argue, these perpendicular
conversations push and pull toward different trajectories, but have as their intersection the most crucial
nexus of political, cultural, and social justice. So what am I, in the end? I am whatever you want me to
be: oppressor, oppressed, cracker, spic, enemy, friend, White, Black, lover, fighter, masculine,
effeminate, strong, weak, dead or alive. Just know that with each turn, each attempt to define me, to
mark me, to confine and bind me, you free me. Like the hysteric who produces ever shifting
configurations of symptoms in order to throw the obsessive physician off guard (see Gherovici, 2003), I
will keep producing knowledge of something else, something other, something that is incalculable and
undefinable. Something Real. For you I’ll become a Hispanic hysteric, screeching Foucault (1972) with
each symptom, with each episode of acting out, “Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain
the same” (p. 17). Because in the end this is not really about me, or where I stand on the color line. It is
about your illusion about where you stand and where you place yourself in the coordinates of race and
ethnicity, of self and other, of Black and White. In that sense I function as your blank screen, receiving
your projections and identifications, hopefully returning them to you as knowledge productions that
question, destabilize, and decenter your ego, paving the way for the subject that slides in the link
between signifier and signified, that does not know if it is caused by the signifier or the signified of race,
but is instead, its own cause.

This card kind of explains what coercive mimeticism is pretty bad ngl
Bowman 10 [Paul Bowman, teaches Cultural Studies @ Cardiff University, Editor’s Introduction, The
Rey Chow Reader, 2010, *brackets for gendered language* //Stefan]

Moreover, Chow points out, “ethnicity can be used as a means of attacking others, of shaming, belittling,
and reducing them to the condition of inauthenticity, disloyalty, and deceit.”27 Ironically, such attacks
are “frequently issued by ethnics themselves against fellow ethnics, that is, the people who are closest
to, who are most like them ethnically,” in what she calls a “fraught trajectory of coercive mimeticism.”28
Coercive mimeticism designates the way in which the forces of all different kinds of discourses and
institutions call us into place, tell us our place, and work to keep us in our place.29 These forces include
(Althusserian) interpellation and (Foucauldian) discipline. According to Chow, coercive mimeticism
ultimately works as “an institutionalized mechanism of knowledge production and dissemination, the
point of which is to manage a non-Western ethnicity through the disciplinary promulgation of the
supposed difference.”30 In the words of Étienne Balibar, to whom Chow frequently refers, “The problem
is to keep ‘in their place,’ from generation to generation, those who have no fixed place; and for this, it
is necessary that they have a genealogy.”31 In other words, even the work of well-meaning specialists of
ethnicity, even expert scholars of ethnicity and ethnic experts in ethnicity, can reinforce ethnicized
hierarchies structured in dominance, simply by insisting on (re)producing their field or object: ethnicity.
Chow proposes that it is helpful to compare and contrast nonwhite and white subjects, that is,
“obvious” (nonwhite) ethnics and those who have ethnicity-without-ethnicity (whiteness). In her
discussion, Chow considers the case of nonwhite ethnic critics, scholars, and academics. They, she
argues, are pressured directly and indirectly to behave “properly”—to act and think and “be” the way
“they” are supposed to act and think and be as nonwhite ethnic academic subjects. If they forget their
ethnicity or their nationalistically or geographically—and hence essentialistically and positivistically—
defined “cultures” and “heritages,” such subjects will be deemed to be sellouts, traitors—inauthentic.
But, Chow explains, if such an ethnic scholar “should … choose, instead, to mimic and perform her own
ethnicity”—that is, to respond or perform in terms of the implicit and explicit hailing or interpellation of
her as an ethnic subject as such, by playing along with the “mimetic enactment of the automatized
stereotypes that are dangled out there in public, hailing the ethnic”32—“[they] would still be considered
a turncoat, this time because [they are] too eagerly pandering to the orientalist tastes of Westerners”33
and, this time, most likely by other nonwhite ethnic subjects. Thus, the ethnic subject seems damned if
she does and damned if she doesn’t “be” an ethnic subject. This damnation, of course, comes from
different parties and with different implications. But Chow’s point is that in contrast, “however far he
chooses to go, a white person sympathetic to or identifying with a nonwhite culture does not in any way
become less white.”34 Indeed, she claims, when it comes to nonwhite peoples doing exactly the same
thing … —that is, becoming sympathetic to or identified with cultures other than their own—we get a
drastically different kind of evaluation. If an ethnic critic should simply ignore her own ethnic history and
become immersed in white culture, she would, needless to say, be deemed a turncoat (one that forgets
her origins).35
Alts
 Language+Rhetoric
The k posits a theory of analyzing the rhetoric of the unconscious, what is revealed as
unsaid, the structural conditions that determine the grammar of signifiers behind their
entire speech act. They operate within pure rhetoric, appealing to the judge as the
interpretant justified their conformism will have value in the form of ballots, we posit
the aff’s debaters proposed plan within a speech act and the imagined world
associated within it in this activity, constantly reshape each other based on their
imaginary absent the judge’s ballot, this understanding establishes the kritik as a
combination of both grammar and our own rhetorical speech acts, only a single
unified model without the intervention of a second model can perceive the
contradiction of invoking their rhetorical acts as a grammatical model.
Felman 03 Writing and Madness: (literature/philosophy/psychoanalysis) By Shoshana Felman Shoshana Felman is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her books include Literature and Psychoanalysis, Testimony, and
(most recently) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Her The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, is being reissued in a new edition by Stanford University Press, with a Foreword by Stanley Cavell and
an Afterword by Judith Butler. ZD

Misprision, for Lacan, is of course an outgrowth of "the trick-iness of the unconscious," which in
language "is revealed by the rhetorical overload Freud shows it utilizes to make its argu-ment":" the
symptom functions like a metaphor, desire like a metonymy, the narcissistic mechanisms of defense and
resistance employ all kinds of "tropes" and "figures of speech"—periphrasis, ellipsis, denial, digression,
irony, litotes, etc.'3 A theory of mispri-sion will thus be a theory of the rhetoric of the unconscious: "On
the basis of the manifestations of the unconscious with which I deal as an analyst, I came to develop a
theory of the effects of the signifier through which I rejoin the preoccupations of rhetoric.",4 Alongside
this inquiry into rhetoric, there is in Lacan's work a second project, focusing on grammar: "Such are the
structural conditions which determine—as grammar—the system of en-croachments constitutive of
the signifiers." The accomplishment of this double project should thus establish a grammar of rhetoric.
The logical coherence of such a project may seem self-evident.
However, for a logician like Charles Sanders Peirce, the logical affiliation between rhetoric and grammar cannot be taken for granted: in fact, Peirce makes a
distinction between "pure rhet-oric" and "pure grammar." What he calls "pure rhetoric" is the well-known process by which one sign engenders
another: a sys-tem of reference from sign to sign in which meaning is but another sign , requiring for its
establishment the intervention of a third element which Peirce calls the interpretant. "Pure grammar," on the other hand, postulates

the possibility of a continuous, binary relationship between sign and meaning not requiring the
interven-tion of a third element . In general, we think of grammar as a logical system par excellence and, as such, identical to itself,
universal, and generative, that is, inscribing the possibility of infinite com-binations and transformations stemming from a single, unified model

without the intervention of another model that would in-terfere with or subvert the first. 16 By contrast,
rhetoric can be perceived only through a discontinuity that subverts or, at the very least, contradicts the logical
continuity of the grammatical model. Rhetoric, to borrow out of context a Lacanian expression, always has an "incongruous
dimension which analysts have not yet en-tirely given up because of their justified feeling that their
conform-ism is of value only on the basis of that dimension. ""
 Death drive
Embracing the death drive is the only way to transcend the false repetition of desire drives and to
allow one to enjoy true pleasures of life—a mode of engagement with the resolution is violent
because it produces only a delusive contentment with the achievement of the aff—the void left by the
objet petit a can never be filled.
McGowan 2013  [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

The death drive, despite the implications of the term itself and Freud’s own suggestions in this direction, is not a drive to die and thereby return to an
inorganic state. Rather than the death that occurs at the end of life, the death drive comes out of a death that
occurs within life. It is a drive to repeat the experience of the loss of the privileged object that gives birth to the
desiring subject. This experience is death in life insofar as it marks the moment at which death installs itself in the
subject and rips the subject out of the cycle of life . The loss of the privileged object derails the subject and distorts
the subject’s relationship to life itself . From this moment on, rather than simply trying to survive or to increase its
vitality, the subject will continually return to the loss that defi nes the structure of its desire .23 Th is disruption of life that
founds the subject as 36 Subjectivity such renders insuffi cient any recourse to an organicist or biological explanation of subjectivity. Th e subject of desire is never just a living subject; it is a

subject that holds within it a form of death, a loss that shapes every relation that it subsequently adopts to the
world. In fact, this loss pulls the subject out of the world and leaves it completely alienated from its environment or lifeworld. Because of the traumatic loss that founds subjectivity, the subject never has a world. It does not exist as a being-in-the-world in the way that Martin Heidegger describes. Heidegger, who rejects the idea of subjectivity, considers our being in
terms of what he calls Dasein, or being-there. For Heidegger, Dasein is always a being-in-the-world and is unimaginable outside its worldliness. We cannot speak of subjectivity when talking about Dasein precisely because subjectivity implies a separation between Dasein and its world. Dasein experiences alienation from its world, but it remains fundamentally a part of that world: its
world is the limit that contains Dasein and that Dasein cannot go beyond. But Heidegger assumes rather than deduces Dasein’s worldliness and its relationship to objects.24 In fact, Heidegger lampoons much of the history of Western philosophy for casting doubt on the existence of the external world and for suggesting that one might need to prove its being. Dasein’s world did not
come into being through an act of sacrifi ce; this world, according to Heidegger, is the horizon that accompanies and constitutes Dasein’s very existence. By privileging the foundational experience of traumatic loss, Freud att empts to apprehend the birth of this relationship between the subject and its world rather than taking it for granted. He implies that one can’t simply assume

Rather than always experiencing a world, the subject as Freud conceives it begins in the
that a world in which one can distinguish objects as distinct from oneself is given a priori.

unworldly state of autoeroticism, where distinctions do not exist. Without some act of negation — the initial sacrifi
ce of nothing — objects cannot emerge out of this undiff erentiated existence. But even aft er this primordial sacrifi ce, the subject does not
att ain the worldliness that Heidegger identifi es with Dasein’s experience. Because it is born through the act of loss, the subject never has — and

never can have — a world. It remains alienated and out of touch from the world, relating to the world and the
objects in the world through the mediation of the lost object . Th e subject, in other words, experiences the presence 37 of the world through the
absence of the privileged object. Th e empirical objects in the world cannot but dissatisfy the subject insofar as they fail to be the object. The lost object structures every

relationship that the subject takes up with the world . Th e experience of traumatic loss has such a hold on the
subject — the subject continually returns to it, re-creates it — because this experience itself engenders desiring
and the object of desiring. Th is foundational experience provides insight into the otherwise inexplicable structure of the celebrated fort/da game that Freud discusses in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Th e analysis of the fort/da game is not simply one example of many concerning the pleasure principle going awry in the 1920 book. It is rather the key
philosophical moment in all of Freud’s work. Th rough the observation of the fort/da game, Freud recognizes the priority of loss in human activity. As everyone acquainted even slightly with
Freud’s work knows, he recounts watching his grandson play a game with a reel on a string, a game that consists of throwing the reel so that it disappears (while saying “fort” [gone]) and then

pulling the reel back (while saying “da” [here]). What surprises Freud about the game is that even though “there is no doubt that greater pleasure was att ached to the second act . . . the fi rst act, that of departure,
was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending.”25 Th e quandary that this game presents for Freud derives from its defi ance of the pleasure principle: repeating the disappearance of the reel more oft en than its more
pleasurable reappearance doesn’t make sense according to Freud’s own theoretical approach. Nonetheless, Freud tries at length to interpret the game in terms of the pleasure principle. He posits, for instance, that his grandson obtains a sense of pleasure from taking an active role in an
event that he initially endured passively (the departure of his privileged object). Even though the actual departure of the object is unpleasant, repeating it actively allows the grandson a sense of mastery that pleases him. Th ough not fully satisfi ed with this explanation, Freud leaves the
discussion of the fort/da game without going further. Because Freud arrests his analysis of the fort/da game just aft er positing that the game provides his grandson with the pleasure of mastery through symbolization, most commentators see this as Freud’s fi nal word on the game. But
as he works through other phenomena that seem to defy the pleasure principle like the fort/da game does, Freud eventually posits a drive beyond the pleasure principle. Th e negative therapeutic reaction, the resistance to the psychoanalytic cure, convinces Freud that

repetition has a much stronger hold on subjects than the quest for pleasure . It is in this light that one must return to the fort/da game and
reinterpret it (even though Freud himself does not). Pleasure is not the final word on this game; there is something more — the pull of

enjoyment, or what Freud calls the death drive.26 Though it seems completely counterintuitive, the subject enjoys the disappearance
of its privileged object; it enjoys not having it rather than having it because this experience returns the subject to
the initial moment of loss where the subject comes closer to the privileged object than at any other time .27 Since
the object does not exist, one cannot recover it; one can only repeat the process through which it is lost . Th is
fundamental link between enjoyment and loss renders enjoyment diffi cult to endure . Th e subject inevitably
suffers its enjoyment. As the example of the fort/da game shows, pleasure serves as an alibi allowing us to endure our enjoyment. Th is is what Freud is gett ing at when he
claims in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that “the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.”28 Precisely because enjoyment traumatizes us with a return to a foundational
experience of loss, we seek the pleasure that accompanies the presence of the object as a way of hiding this trauma from ourselves. But this pleasure is also fundamentally deceptive; it has a

the pleasure accompanying the recovery of the lost object appears as the ultimate
wholly imaginary status. Th at is to say,

pleasure when we anticipate it but diminishes exponentially when we realize it . When we look at pleasure in this way, Freud’s grandson’s lack of interest in the
“pleasurable ending” of the reel’s return becomes easier to understand — as does the consumer’s lack of interest in the commodities that she or he has already purchased.29 We can also understand the appeal of tragedy as an art form. If we think about art only in terms of the pleasure
it provides, the emergence of tragedy seems diffi cult to comprehend, though Aristotle does manage to think of it in a way that approximates Freud’s pleasure principle. Th e pleasure principle necessitates that the subject rid itself of excess excitation: pleasure comes not from excitement

but from a neutral state in which one lacks excitation. For Aristotle , we are drawn to tragedy because it works “with incidents arousing pity and fear,
wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions .”30 Th at is, tragedy allows us to rid ourselves of the
excessive emotions of pity and terror, and this process accounts for the pleasure that tragedy provides . But this
explanation seems to underestimate art’s ability to augment our emotional state, to leave us with more emotional excitation than before having experienced the work of art. If the point of
tragedy is the release of powerful emotions, Aristotle can’t explain why it fi rst must augment these feelings in the spectator prior to facilitating their release. Any explanation that thinks of art
purely in terms of pleasure will undoubtedly run into similar diffi culties when it comes to tackling our desire for tragedy. Even if tragedy as an art form doesn’t off er us much in the way of

While watching a tragedy, we enjoy the repetition of the experience of loss . What’s
pleasure, it does provide an opportunity for us to enjoy.

more, tragedy does not simply depict a random loss. Th e loss it highlights is always in some sense self-infl icted .
Oedipus blinds himself; Antigone defi es Creon in order to make her death inevitable; Hamlet chooses to confront Claudius even though he knows it will cost him his life; and so on. Th e tragic

heroes are not initially responsible for their fall, like Oedipus in Oedipus
hero is at once the agent responsible for the experience of loss and the one who endures it. Even when tragic

assume responsibility, as if they had willed it, which has the eff ect of transforming the externally infl
Tyrannus, they

icted wound into a self-inflicted one.31 Tragedy’s focus on the self-infl icted loss returns us as spectators to our own
initial loss of the privileged object — the primordial self-inflicted wound . The enjoyment that tragedy produces in
the spectator occurs through the repetition of sacrifice.

The death drive is the only method of finding satisfaction and happiness in life
McGowan 2013  [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre
The political dimension of psychoanalysis comes into better focus when we understand it as an economic theory. Though Freud at times puts ideas in economic terms, he doesn’t make the economics of psychoanalytic thought fully

The economics of psychoanalysis emphasize, in contrast to the

explicit. But economics is nonetheless present and awaiting explication in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis.

an ability to find satisfaction in our drive rather than seeking the ultimate satisfaction elsewhere . It is an
economics of capitalism,

economics that renounces any form of accumulation or attainment . Finding satisfaction in our drive frees us from
the dissatisfaction associated with trying to comply with social demands, whatever form they assume . Sometimes social
authorities demand that we obey or conform, while at other times they demand that we consume or express our individuality. In any case, such demands and our adherence to them
lead inevitably to dissatisfaction. We try to acquire in this way an object or a sense of recognition that is impossible to obtain. What’s more, this pursuit leaves us
dependent on the social authority that issues the demands . In this way, the economic structure of capitalism and the
endless pursuit of accumulation that it compels correspond with the subject’s dependence on the power of
social authority. Psychoanalysis envisions a break from accumulation and from dependence . The political project of
psychoanalysis envisions a turn away from searching for the ultimate satisfaction located elsewhere — from
accumulation — and toward enjoyment, a turn made possible by rethinking where our enjoyment lies. According
to psychoanalytic economics, enjoyment is located in what disturbs us rather than in what we might obtain, and
when we grasp this, we change the nature of our political subjectivity. The obstacle to our enjoyment is at once
the source of our enjoyment, not what we must eliminate in order to discover the ultimate satisfaction . An idea of the economics of the psyche

underlies Freud’s work throughout his career, but it becomes most explicit in a very early work, the unfinished Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895.1 In this manuscript, Freud att empts to account for psychic processes according to a completely mechanical model, a model that marginalizes the eff ects of consciousness almost completely. Th ough for many psychoanalytically informed thinkers the physiological nature of Freud’s theory at this point severely restricts its pertinence for understanding the psyche, one can translate Freud’s physiological theory into a

Freud believes that the aim of psychic life involves returning

psychic one.2 In the Project, Freud sees the psyche as a system designed to discharge psychic energy that is transmitt ed through neurones. Energy bombards the psyche from both inside and out — through endogamous forces and external stimuli. At this point in his thought,

to a zero level of excitation, an aim that he later aligns with the pleasure principle. By warding off excitation, the psychic processes free the
psyche from unpleasure and return it to a state of satisfaction . Once Freud conceived of the death drive in 1920, his conception of satisfaction underwent a
fundamental shift . Whereas in the vision of the Project and his other pre-1920 work (which views the psyche in terms of the pleasure principle) satisfaction is a state that the psyche arrives at through the discharge of excitation,

aft er the discovery of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle satisfaction will consist in the movement of the drive itself, not in the aim
that it attains. Nonetheless, what remains constant in these two different economic models is the absolute psychic primacy of satisfaction. Th e psyche strives above all to sustain its satisfaction, and it is successful at doing so. Satisfaction occurs in the operations of the psyche because, as Freud sees it in 1895, the discharge of excitation always occurs. Th ough there are infi nite diff erences among individual subjects, we can say that all subjects are satisfi ed subjects insofar as they partake in the process of discharging

Th at is, what the psyche does is universal, but how the

54 Subjectivity excitation. For every subject, this process fi nds a way to occur successfully, even if it encounters a circuitous path in the psyche. Individual diff erence manifests itself in diff erent psychic paths, but not in the fundamental fact of discharging excitation.

psyche goes about doing this varies in each particular case . The universality of what the psyche does allows Freud to recognize that the economy of the psyche produces satisfaction for every subject, even if the subject is unaware of its own satisfaction. Th is remains true when Freud turns from the 1895 model of the psyche to the later one

the death drive, though in the later theory satisfaction derives from the drive’s constant force rather than from a discharge of excitation. Th e drive provides an inescapable
centered on

satisfaction by never letting up. When we think of therapy of any kind, including psychoanalysis, we usually think of a trajectory moving from dissatisfaction to some degree of satisfaction. Subjects enter therapy with a psychic ailment causing dissatisfaction, and if the treatment succeeds, they leave with the ability to lead a more satisfying existence.3 If subjects didn’t feel dissatisfaction, they wouldn’t enter into any therapy, and if they didn’t att ain

some satisfaction as a result, therapy would cease to be a viable practice. But despite its commonsensical appearance, this model does not apply to psychoanalytic therapy — or, rather, psychoanalysis is not therapy in this sense. Rather than effectuate a qualitative change in the subject by transforming dissatisfaction into satisfaction, psychoanalysis att empts to intervene — and finds the justification for its intervention — on a quantitative level. Rather than att empting to cure dissatisfi ed subjects, psychoanalysis confronts subjects who are satisfi ed but who spend too

. Th e death drive and the repetition that it installs in the subject follow a self-
much psychic eff ort or who take a path that is too circuitous for the satisfaction they obtain. In this sense, psychoanalysis is fundamentally an economic theory of the psyche

satisfying course. Th e death drive fi nds a path to satisfaction or enjoyment despite — or because of — whatever
obstacles the external world might erect. Th e satisfaction of the subject is the one constant in psychoanalytic thought, and it leads Freud to postulate the existence of the drive as the
source of that satisfaction.4 Th e satisfaction that the death drive produces stems from its circular structure: rather than trying to

att ain satisfaction through an external aim, the drive produces that satisfaction through the process of the
repeated movement itself. Th e self-satisfi ed quality of the drive diff erentiates it from physiological need: needs undergo fl uctuation from a state of dissatisfaction to one of satisfaction when they
achieve their aim. Th e drive, on the other hand, never fl uctuates.5 Unlike biological need (which might be satisfi ed or not, depending on whether it discovers its object), the drive (which has an
absent object) always involves satisfaction. Th us, psychoanalysis, a practice oriented around the drive, cannot intervene by way of off ering a missing satisfaction or providing a helping
hand to those down on their luck.6 Th e psychoanalytic intervention must be strictly economic, that is, involving the quantity of psychic eff ort expended by the analysand. Th e aim of the psychoanalyst — the analyst’s

desire — must be to remove the detours that the analysand has placed along the path of the drive in order to allow
the analysand to take up completely her or his position in the drive . In Seminar XI, Lacan lays out the situation confronting the analyst: “What we have before us in analysis is a system in which everything turns out all right, and which att ains its own sort of satisfaction. If we interfere in this, it is only in so far

as we think that there are other ways, shorter ones for example.”7 In submitt ing to analysis, the analysand submits, albeit unknowingly, to this desire for shortening or economizing the path of the drive. Th is shortening is the analytic cure, and Freud fi rst comes to understand it as such in the 1895 Project where he emphasizes the costs of psychic detours that the subject erects to the fl ow of psychic energy.

Embracing the death drive creates a new of subject formation which breaks free of the
repetitive politics.
McGowan 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

the formulation of a psychoanalytically informed political project demands that we

In light of this barrier,

dissociate politics from progress as it is usually conceived . We cannot escape progress, and yet the traditional conception of progress always
runs aground. Th is paradox must become the foundation of any authentic psychoanalytic politics. It demands that rather

than trying to progress toward overcoming the barrier that separates us from the good society, we begin to view identification with the barrier as the paradoxical aim of progress. The

barrier to the good society — the social symptom — is at once the obstacle over which we continually
stumble and the source of our enjoyment .32 Th e typical politics of the good aims at a future not inhibited
by a limit that constrains the present . Th is future can take the form of a truly representative democracy, a socialist utopia, a society with a fair distribution of
power and wealth, or even a fascist order that would expel those who embody the limit. But the good remains out of reach despite the various eff orts to reach it. The limit separating us from

a
the good society is the very thing that constitutes the good society as such. Overcoming the limit shatters the idea of the good in the act of achieving it. In place of this pursuit,

psychoanalytic politics insists on identification with the limit rather than attempting to move beyond or
eliminate it. If there is a conception of progress in this type of politics, it is progress toward the obstacle
that bars us from the good rather than toward the good itself . Identification with the limit involves an embrace of the repetition of the drive
because it is the obstacle or limit that is the point to which the drive returns. No one can be the perfect subject of the drive because the drive is what undermines all perfection. But it is
nonetheless possible to change one’s experience within it. Th e fundamental wager of psychoanalysis — a wager that renders the idea of a psychoanalytic political project thinkable — is that
repetition undergoes a radical transformation when one adopts a different attitude toward it. We may be condemned to repeat, but we aren’t condemned to repeat the same position relative

to our repetition.By embracing repetition through identifi cation with the obstacle to progress rather than trying
to achieve the good by overcoming this obstacle, the subject or the social order changes its very nature .
Instead of being the burden that one seeks to escape, repetition becomes the essence of one’s being and the mode through

which one att ains satisfaction. Conceiving politics in terms of the embrace of repetition rather than the
construction of a good society takes the movement that derails traditional political projects and reverses
its valence. Th is idea of politics lacks the hopefulness that Marxism, for instance, can provide for overcoming antagonism and loss. With it, we lose not just a utopian ideal but the idea
of an alternative future altogether — the idea of a future no longer beset by intransigent limits — and this idea undoubtedly mobilizes much political energy.33 What we gain, however, is a

It is by abandoning the terrain of the good and adopting the

political form that addresses the way that subjects structure their enjoyment.

death drive as its guiding principle that emancipatory politics can pose a genuine alternative to the dominance of global
capitalism rather than incidentally creating new avenues for its expansion and development. Th e death drive is the revolutionary contribution that psychoanalysis makes to political thought. But since it is a concept relatively foreign to political thought, I will turn to various examples from history, literature, and fi lm in order to concretize what Freud means by the death drive and
illustrate just what a politics of the death drive might look like. Th e chapters that follow trace the implications of the death drive for thinking about the subject as a political entity and for conceiving the political structure of society. Part 1 focuses on the individual subject, beginning with an explanation of how the death drive shapes this subjectivity. Th e various chapters in part 1
trace the implications of the death drive for understanding how the subject enjoys, how the drive relates to social class, how the drive impacts the subject as an ethical being, and how the subject becomes politicized. Th e discussion of the impact of the death drive on the individual subject serves as a foundation for articulating its impact on society, which part 2 of the book
addresses, beginning with the impact of the death drive on the constitution of society. Part 2 then examines how the conception of the death drive helps in navigating a path through today’s major political problems: the ineffi cacity of consciousness raising, the seductive power of fantasy, the growing danger of biological reductionism and fundamentalism, the lure of religious belief,
and the failure of att empts to lift repression. Th e two parts of the book do not att empt to sketch a political goal to be att ained for the subject or for society but instead to recognize the structures that already exist and silently inform both. Th e wager of what follows is that the revelation of the death drive and its reach into the subject and the social order can be the foundation for

Th rough this cure, the subject abandons the belief in the possibility
reconceiving freedom. Th e recognition of the death drive as foundational for subjectivity is what occurs with the psychoanalytic cure.

of fi nding a solution to the problem of subjectivity . Th e loss for which one seeks restitution becomes a constitutive loss — and becomes visible as
the key to one’s enjoyment rather than a barrier to it. A political project derived from psychoanalytic thought would work to broaden this cure by bringing it outside the clinic and enacting on
society itself. Th e point is not, of course, that everyone would undergo psychoanalysis but that psychoanalytic theory would function as a political theory. Politically, the importance of
psychoanalysis is theoretical rather than practical. Politically, it doesn’t matt er whether people undergo psychoanalytic therapy or not. Th is theory would inaugurate political change by

insisting not on the possibility of healing and thereby att aining the ultimate pleasure but on the indissoluble link between our enjoyment and loss. We become free to
enjoy only when we have recognized the intractable nature of loss . Th ough psychoanalytic thought insists on our freedom to enjoy, it
understands freedom in a counterintuitive way. It is through the death drive that the subject att ains its freedom . Th e loss that founds this drive
frees the subject from its dependence on its social environment, and the repetition of the initial loss sustains this freedom. By embracing the inescapability of traumatic loss, one embraces

Rather than looking to the possibility of

one’s freedom, and any political project genuinely concerned with freedom must orient itself around loss.

overcoming loss, our political projects must work to remain faithful to it and enhance our contact with
it. Only in this way does politics have the opportunity to carve out a space for the freedom to enjoy
rather than restricting it under the banner of the good .
The alt creates conditions of change which break subject passivity. When subjects
engage in acts purely for enjoyment, the incoherence of the social order is uncovered
and spillover into change occurs.
McGowan 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre
As long as Hamlet hopes that his act might accomplish something substantial, the moment will never be right for it. Once he ceases to believe in the possibility of restoring justice and understands the act only in terms of his own

Subjects who hope to make an impact on social authority never act

fantasmatic enjoyment, he frees himself from the search for the proper moment.

because they cannot calculate how the authority will respond to the act . Such subjects, like Hamlet at the beginning of the
play, spend their time probing the authority’s desire and waiting for the moment when the act will make

the proper impact on the other. But that moment never comes. When one adopts the position of the
fool, the moment for the act is always at hand because the fool’s act has nothing to do with the
readiness of the social authority for it. There is a danger in advocating the subjectivity of the fool, however. Many adopt the position of the fool as a symbolic identity that provides meaning for their lives. Such subjects perversely act out rather than accomplishing genuinely
successful acts. The difference consists in how the subject relates to the position of the fool. The perverse fool acts in order to provoke the social authority into a response, while the genuine fool acts for the sake of its own enjoyment regardless of the authority’s response. The former derives a sense of identity from the position; the latter does not. The difference between the
perverse subject and the authentic fool is visible within the character of Hamlet. After he first hears of his father’s murder at the beginning of the play, Hamlet feigns madness; he literally plays the part of the fool. But he takes up this position in order to provoke authority, not in order to realize his own enjoyment. Hamlet uses his madness in an attempt to trigger a reaction in
Claudius that will offer definitive proof of the latter’s guilt. But even when Claudius reacts in the way that Hamlet wants to the performance of the provocative play that Hamlet has produced, Hamlet still does not act but continues to act out. It is only well after the play ends, after he has realized the absence of any order in the world or any guarantee for his action in social
authority, that Hamlet is able to act. When he acts, he acts not on the basis of laws or justice but on the basis of his own fantasy frame. In act 5 he becomes the authentic fool, one no longer playing to the crowd but determined to follow his fantasy regardless of authority’s response. In so doing, he provides a model for successful subjectivity, for how the subject might act to change
the world.36 Publicly insisting on one’s fantasy hardly seems like a prescription for changing the world in any substantive fashion. If this is the political attitude advanced by psychoanalysis, the indictment of psychoanalysis on political grounds appears to have a great deal of merit. But this would be to move too quickly. We might think of the relationship between embracing one’s
own fantasy and politics as a twisted version of the line from the Talmud that characters repeat in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993): “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Translated into our terms this would become: “Whoever publicly insists on her or his own fantasy opens this path for the world entire.” By doing this, the subject institutes a fundamental change

When one subject opts for the nonsense of its own enjoyment over the blandishments of
in the structure of its symbolic world .

recognition, this act exposes the groundlessness of social authority — the emptiness around which the
social order is structured. A collective awareness of the groundlessness of social authority would
produce a different sort of social order, one in which subjects would be unable to rely on authority and
would have to assume responsibility themselves for the social order . They would lose the sense of authorization for their acts. The
freedom inherent in social existence would become evident in light of authority’s evanescence .

Emancipatory politics can only be successful through psychoanalysis.

McGowan 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre
Perhaps the most important political problem of the last century concerns lifting repression. Even more than the obstacle of religious belief, repression represents a rigid barrier that has often

lifting repression doesn’t necessarily

been the focus of emancipatory politics. But as the history especially of the last half of the twentieth century has shown,

lead to political liberation. It can even, as the main thesis of the Frankfurt School has it, become the vehicle for further decreasing
the freedom of the subject in the face of ideological control . As societies eliminate varieties of
repression, some fundamental deadlock remains recalcitrant and stands as a political stumbling block.1
If the political project of lifting repression inevitably goes awry, then this confronts the project of emancipation with the question of what it can do . This is where the intervention of
psychoanalytic thought makes itself felt. Psychoanalysis has historically functioned as a tool for the struggle against repression, but if the attempt to fight repression inevitably fails or even
backfires, the engagement of psychoanalytic thought with politics today requires a new attitude. The key to the political project of psychoanalysis lies in the unexpected twist that it gives to

the fight against repression. According to this project, one must reenvision the deadlock that limits the political project of lifting
repression. Rather than seeing the deadlock that projects for emancipation encounter as purely a
stumbling block to be negotiated, one might embrace the deadlock as itself a political position . A properly
psychoanalytic politics would transform it from an obstacle into a point of identification. By identifying with the symbolic deadlock that impedes

liberation, one can transform the cause of past political failures into a source of success . But the cost of this
transformation is a redefinition of success as clarifying and embracing a limit rather than transcending it. The ultimate contribution of psychoanalytic thought

to politics is its ability to provide a basis for an emancipatory politics of the limit .2
Their advocacy statement imagines a state of social good which organizes desire
around a demand against authority—the radical act is not demanding something, but
demanding nothing, the demand of a lack which no authority can fill
McGOWAN 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of
Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] //afre

The politics of the death drive begins with the revolutionary idea of subjectivity that Freud uncovers: his understanding that the subject doesn’t seek knowledge but instead desires . Following
from this idea, the traditional notion of progress becomes untenable, and the subject becomes self-destructive. On the one hand, earlier thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche anticipate Freud’s revolutionary turn from the subject of knowledge to the subject of
desire. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche emphasize how our quest for knowledge serves as a guise for a more fundamental quest for satisfaction, and in this way they overturn the traditional philosophical conception of subjectivity.1 But on the other hand, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
fail to grasp the significance of the human animal’s entrance into the field of knowledge or language. For both, will exists on one side and knowledge (or representation) on the other, and will is nothing but a biological fact. Freud’s conception of desiring subjectivity recognizes that the
subject is the result of instinct being deformed through its submission to the realm of knowledge. Though we act on behalf of desire rather than knowledge, we do so, paradoxically, because our instincts are mediated by knowledge. Freud’s subject, in contrast to Schopenhauer’s and
Nietzsche’s, never experiences pure biological instincts but rather a desire that remains unconscious.2 Authentically prioritizing desire requires an idea of the unconscious not simply as the site of a will or instinct associated with human animality but as a radically different psychic scene
fundamentally irreducible to consciousness. 26 Subjectivity For Freud, the subject doesn’t know its unconscious desire not because of its failure to grasp its continued animality but because unconscious desire gives birth to the subject and always remains in front of every project of
knowledge. Freud’s revolution is a genuine one — tied to a unique vision of how subjectivity emerges.3 The political implications of psychoanalytic thought begin with its understanding of the genesis of subjectivity, an understanding that sets psychoanalysis apart from other political

The foundational status of loss

theorizing of all stripes. entails a politics centered around repetition rather than for the subject the of loss

the achievement of the good This new relation is the

. Psychoanalytic thought sees us as condemned to the repetition of loss, but it aims at freeing us to take up a new relation to this repetition.

emancipatory project of psychoanalytic politics . Initially, as Freud conceives it, the human animal is an autoerotic being that has no object world. The distinction between self and other (or subject and
object) is not a fact of birth but a psychical achievement. The infant’s autoerotic mode does not yet differentiate between itself and objects, and the being finds some degree of satisfaction in its undifferentiated existence. This autoeroticism is not yet even narcissism. The narcissistic
relationship of the subject with its own ego requires the formation of an ego, which can only form through a break in the autoerotic circuit. As Freud puts it in “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” “A unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be
developed. Th e auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very first; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism — a new psychical action — in order to bring about narcissism.”4 Because the ego is just a special sort of object (one that competes with other objects for
the subject’s libido), it can form and the subject can become narcissistic only after the subject has created the division between subject and object. This creative act — what Freud calls “a new psychical action” — produces a division out of the undifferentiated autoeroticism of the human

The subject emerges through the experience of loss

animal. as such an initial act of sacrifice . It is the loss of a part of the subject — — that

creates both subject and object, the object emerging through this act as what the subject has lost of
itself . The subject takes an interest in the object world because it forms this world around its lost object. As Jacques Lacan notes, “Never, in our concrete experience of analytic theory, do we do without the notion of 27 The Formation of Subjectivity the lack of the object as
central. It is not a negative, but the very spring for the relation of the subject to the world.”5 The loss of the object generates a world around this loss to which the subject can relate. Obviously, no one literally creates objects through an initial act of sacrifice of an actual body part. This
would be too much to ask. But the psychical act of sacrifice allows for a distinction to develop where none existed before and simultaneously directs the subject’s desire toward the object world. In his breakthrough essay “Negation,” Freud describes this process as follows: “Th e
antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the fi rst. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external
object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to fi nd an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there.”6 Though Freud doesn’t use terms from
linguistics, it is clear that he is making reference to the subject’s alienation in language and that he sees this alienation as the key to the emergence of both the subject and the object. When the subject submits to the imperatives of language, it enters into an indirect relation with the

The speaking being does not relate to books, pencils, and paper but to “books,” “pencils,” and
object world.

“paper.” The signifier intervenes The subject’s alienation into language deprives it
between the subject and the object that the subject perceives.

of immediate contact with the object world . And yet, in the above passage from “Negation,” Freud conceives of the subject’s entrance into language — its “capacity to bring before the mind once more something
that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there” — as the event that produces the very distinction between subject and object. Th is means that the indirectness or mediation introduced by language deprives the
subject of a direct relation to the object world that it never had. Prior to its immersion in the mediation of language, the subject had no object at all — not a privileged relation to objects but a complete absence of relationality as such due to its autoeroticism. In this sense, the subject’s
willingness to accede to its alienation in language is the fi rst creative act, a sacrifi ce that produces the objects that the subject cannot directly access. Language is important not for its own sake but because it is the site of our 28 Subjectivity founding sacrifi ce. We know that the subject
has performed this act of sacrifice when we witness the subject functioning as a being of language, but the sacrifi ce is not an act that the subject takes up on its own. Others always impose the entry into language on the subject. Th eir exhortations and incentives to speak prompt the
emergence of the speaking subject. But the subject’s openness to alienation in language, its willingness to sacrifi ce a part of itself in order to become a speaking subject, suggests a lack in being itself prior to the entry into language. Th at is, the act through which the subject cedes the
privileged object and becomes a subject coincides with language but is irreducible to it. The subject engages in the act of sacrifi ce because it does not fi nd its initial autoeroticism perfectly satisfying — the unity of the autoerotic being is not perfect — and this lack of complete satisfaction
produces the opening through which language and society grab onto the subject through its alienating process. If the initial autoerotic state of the human animal were perfectly satisfying, no one would begin to speak, and subjectivity would never form. Speaking as such testifi es to an
initial wound in our animal being and in being itself. But subjectivity emerges only out of a self-wounding. Even though others encourage the infant to abandon its autoerotic state through a multitude of inducements, the initial loss that constitutes subjectivity is always and necessarily
self-infl icted. Subjectivity has a fundamentally masochistic form, and it continually repeats the masochistic act that founds it. Th e act of sacrifi ce opens the door to the promise of a satisfaction that autoerotic isolation forecloses, which is why the incipient subject abandons the

autoerotic state and accedes to the call of sociality. But the term “sacrifi ce” is misleading insofar as it suggests that the subject has given up a wholeness (with itself or with its parent) that exists prior to being lost. In the act of sacrifi ce, the incipient
subject gives up something that it doesn’t have . Th e initial loss that founds subjectivity is not at all substantial; it is the ceding of nothing. Th rough this defi ning gesture, the subject sacrifi ces its lost object
into being. But if the subject cedes nothing, this initial act of sacrifi ce seems profoundly unnecessary. Why can’t the subject emerge without it? Why is the experience of loss necessary for the subject to constitute itself qua subject? Th e answer lies in the diff erence between need and

desire. While needs the of the human animal are not dependent on the experience of loss , the subject’s desires are . 29 The Formation of Subjectivity It is the initial act of
sacrifice that gives birth to desire: the subject sacrifi ces nothing in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire. As Richard Boothby puts it in his unequaled explanation of the psychoanalytic conception of the emergence of desire, “Th e destruction and loss of the
object . . . opens up a symbolic dimension in which what was lost might be recovered in a new form.”7 He adds: “Sacrifi ce serves to constitute the very matrix of desire. Th e essential function of sacrifi ce is less do ut des, I give so that you might give, than do ut desidero: I give in order

that I might desire.”8 Th e subject’s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing as a positive entity and only exists insofar as it is lost. This is why one can
never attain the object lost or the object that causes one to desire.9 Th e coming-into-being of this object originates the subject of desire, but, having no substance, the object can never become an empirical object of desire. We may see an object of
desire as embodying the lost object, but whenever we obtain this object, we discover its emptiness. Th e lost object is constitutively rather than empirically lost. Eating Nothing In this light, we can see the anorexic as the model for all desiring subjectivity. Most cultural critics justifi ably
see anorexia as the product of oppressive defi nitions of femininity that abound in contemporary society and force women to starve themselves in order to fi t the ideals of feminine beauty. According to Naomi Wolf ’s classic popular account in Th e Beauty Myth, the ideal of thinness
became a way of controlling women — disciplining their bodies — aft er the idea of natural female inferiority began to evanesce.10 Th e anorexic embodies female victimization: she has internalized a patriarchal ideal and does violence to her own body in order to live up to this ideal. But

the problem with this analysis is that the anorexic goes too far
doesn’t just try to embody the ideal of feminine beauty.11 She in her pursuit of thinness and comes to inhabit a body far from the ideal. Even when everyone tells her that she no

longer looks good, that she is too thin, the anorexic continues to lose weight. It is for this reason that many feminists have seen her as a subversive figure .
As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, “Neither a ‘disorder’ of the ego nor, as popular opinion has it, a ‘dieting disease’ gone out of control, anorexia can, like the phantom limb, be a kind of mourning 30 Subjectivity for a pre-Oedipal (i.e., pre-castrated) body and a corporeal connection to the mother
that women in patriarchy are required to abandon. Anorexia is a form of protest at the social meaning of the female body.”12 Grosz accounts for the excessiveness of anorexia by aligning it with feminist resistance to patriarchy rather than obsequious submission to it. But she aligns the

the true radicality of the anorexic stems from the power of

anorexic with wholeness and the maternal bond rather than with the lost object. In this sense, she misses , a radicality that

the anorexic’s desire. The anorexic doesn’t simply refuse to eat but eats nothing , the nothing that is the
lost object . While all positive forms of food fail to address the subject’s lack, nothing does speak to the subject’s desire and allows that desire to sustain itself. Th e anorexic starves not because she can’t fi nd, in the mode of Kafk a’s hunger artist, any food that would

The logic of anorexia lays bare the hidden workings of

satisfy her but because she has found a satisfying food, a food that nourishes the desiring subject rather than the living being.

desire that operate within every subject . Subjects believe that they pursue various objects of desire (a new car, a

but the real engine for their desire resides in the nothing that the
new house, a new romantic partner, and so on) and that these objects have an intrinsic attraction,

subject has given up and that every object tries and fails to represent. Objects of desire are desirable
only insofar as they attempt to represent the impossible lost object , which is what the anorexic reveals . Still,
the anorexic is exceptional; most nonanorexic subjects imagine that their lost object can be found in something rather than nothing. Despite its resonances with the structure of desire, anorexia cannot be dissociated from the imposition of the ideal of thinness as a mode of controlling
female subjectivity. Th ough this ideal distorts the anorexic’s relationship to her own body, it also renders the nature of desire itself apparent. Th e impossible ideal of perfect thinness allows the anorexic subject to avow, albeit unconsciously, the structural impossibility of desire itself.
Unlike male subjects (or other female subjects who manage to distance themselves from the ideal), the anorexic cannot avoid confronting the impossibility of her object. Th e oppressive ideal of perfect thinness allows the anorexic to bear witness with her body to the truth of desire.13

Rather than being the successful achievement of

Understanding the impossible nature of the lost object — what the anorexic makes clear — allows us to rethink the nature of the political act. some

some social good, the political act involves insisting on one’s desire in the face of its
object, the accomplishment of

impossibility, which is precisely what occurs in the death drive . The key to a politics of the death drive is grasping, in the fashion of the anorexic, the nothingness of the object and
thereby finding satisfaction in the drive itself. But the subject’s relationship to its object inherently creates an illusion that makes this possibility almost impossible. Though the lost object that initiates subjectivity has no substance, its status for the subject belies its nothingness. For the
subject, the originary lost object is the object that seems to hold the key to the subject’s very ability to enjoy. Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion: the loss of the object retroactively causes a prior state of completion to arise — a state of completion that
never actually existed — and the object itself bears the promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state.14 In short, it promises to fill in the subject’s lack and answer its desire. As a result of this investment on the part of the subject, the initial lost object becomes the engine

Through the loss of

for all the subject’s subsequent desiring. Without the initial act of sacrifice, the would-be subject neither desires nor enjoys but instead suffocates in a world of self-presence, a self-presence in which one has no freedom whatsoever.

the privileged object, one frees oneself from the complete domination of authority by creating a (parental or social)

lack that no authority can fill . Ceding the object is thus the founding act of subjectivity and the fi rst free act. Every subsequent effort by authority to give the subject what it lacks will come up short — or, more correctly, will go too far,

dissatisfaction and disappointment are correlative with freedom: when we

because only nothing can fill the gap within the subject. For this reason,

experience the authority’s failure to give us what we want, at that moment we also experience our
distance from the authority and our radical freedom as subjects .

Revolutionary imagination posits an image of the good which we can never achieve—
our alternative is a permanent revolt against identity and power—this can exist only
as endless negation
McGOWAN 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of
Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

The great challenge that psychoanalysis poses for emancipatory politics — and for politics as such — is its absolute
rejection of the good society good or the . In the opening of the Politics, Aristotle describes the good as the basic aim of political activity, and this aim has remained constant in the intervening 2,500 years.7 Aristotle never att empts to
prove this constitutive remark in his treatise but simply takes it as an unassailable postulate of political thinking. For subsequent political thinkers, the question does not concern Aristotle’s claim about the good but in what the good consists. Th ere is unanimity about the political pursuit

of the good not just among political theorists but among almost everyone who thinks about politics at all. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, however, there is no good at all. The good society is unattainable not just as a result
of the competing desires of the individuals within the society. Th e theory that aligns social confl ict with the coexistence of competing individual desires fails to go far enough in envisioning the antagonistic nature of the social order. No matt er how divergent individual desires are, one
could always imagine reconciling them with each other through some sort of compromise. A thinker such as John Rawls can imagine a just society despite positing a society divided by innumerable competing desires on the level of the individual. Justice here would consist in the idea of
fairness — using one’s imagination to envision society through what Rawls labels a “veil of ignorance” that allows one to make decisions about justice without taking into account one’s individual interests or desires or social position.8 Th is would facilitate a good society in which any

The good
inequality would be socially justifi ed, and it would thus reconcile competing individual desire But the barrier to the good society runs deeper than this. It derives from the very idea of the good, which Freud sees as fundamentally at odds with itself.

itself, not our failures to achieve it, is the problem. This is the fundamental political insight that
psychoanalysis brings to the table. It is at once the challenge that it poses to emancipatory politics and
the basis for its implicit project for emancipation . As we get closer to the ideal of a good society, we simultaneously approach the emptiness concealed within the ideal. Th e notion of the good does not
emerge simply from moral reasoning and speculation about the proper arrangement of society. We develop this notion only through the experience of its prohibition. Th at is to say, the prohibition of the good doesn’t form an obstacle to a preexisting ideal but constitutes the ideal as
such. Th e good has no existence outside of the barriers that we erect around realizing it. As Jacques Lacan points out in one of his most important political statements, “Th e step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good — that the
Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.”9 Th e foundational link between the good and prohibition renders its pursuit

Every step toward the good occasions a corresponding step away from it. The closer we come,
completely contradictory.

the more we undermine the social stability that we hoped to achieve. Th is occurs not just among the many utopian socialist projects that have failed but across all

This critique threatens to undermine the very

types of social structures. For psychoanalysis, the good is not just an unrealizable ideal but a deception incapable of orienting a coherent and sustainable politics.

idea of a political project because political theorists write in order to help bring about change, which means moving society in the direction of the good (even if they admit that the ideal itself is not realizable). Conservative theorists seem
immune to this critique, but they envision a return to the good or the creation of a social stability that they associate implicitly with the good.10 Political theorists of all stripes write to change the world and assist its progression (or its return to a better state), whereas psychoanalysis

Kristeva theorizes the political project inherent in

interprets the world and uncovers the repetition at work where it seems to be progressing. For this reason, Julia

psychoanalysis as one of permanent revolt. Rather than forming a positive program, psychoanalysis , like

exists simply as a negation of identity and power

modernist literature, . In Th e Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, she argues, “psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and a certain literature, on the other,

psychoanalysis demands revolt, but revolt can never

perhaps constitute possible instances of revolt culture.”11 From Kristeva’s point of view, is completely political insofar as it this

become revolution . Psychoanalytic revolt is destined to remain revolt against some existing power structure toward which it will continue to provide resistance. Kristeva views psychoanalytic thought as a hiccup in the hegemony of scientifi c rationality

Any attempt to create a positive psychoanalytic politics would obviate its role as a key part of
and progress.

revolt culture .
This negation exploits the politics of stupidity—an unreadable demand for nothing
creates a site for love and solidarity without reproducing our desire for recognition by
the Master
WELTY 2018 (William, PhD Candidate at Rutgers, TOWARDS A POLITICS OF STUPIDITY, Politics/Letters,
May 30, http://politicsslashletters.org/features/towards-politics-stupidity/)

One of the main issues with the late 20th century model of critique is its limitation to conceiving of power as prohibition or proliferation.[4] One of Lacan’s major insights was to recognize this type of

power relation at work not just in the discourse about sex or politics, as in Foucault, but in academic discourse , knowledge-based in general. Lacan describes such relations in his Discourse of the University, updating the
Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic to one of Master/Student and demonstrating how resistance often merely creates new force fields of power. In his seminar following the 1968 protests in Paris, Lacan admonishes the student protesters, many of whom were likely in the audience: “As
hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!”[5] The hysteric provides an apt starting point for a critique of political protest as a direct confrontation between protester and power, and uncoincidentally, is the epithet often hurled at the Left from the Right.[6] On one hand, the

in the very act of resistance,

hysteric is an unreadable and resistant figure, repulsed by power (sexual, or otherwise) and fighting hard against it. But simultaneously, the hysteric desires that the repressive power desires him/her back. Thus,

this subversive desire still desires “a new master,” Isn’t this the precise critique made by as Lacan articulately points out.

Angela Peoples Don’t forget: White Women voted for Trump in her now infamous sign at the 2017 Women’s March: “ ”?[7]

Peoples
On her sign, provides a more nuanced reading of the invokes a return of the repressed that combines the legacy of psychoanalysis with the activism of intersectional feminism. And, she

situation than Lacan on his own What one should avoid is would be capable. Lacan, or at least Žižek’s reading of him, anticipates and critiques a Foucauldian reading of power: “ here

the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the
result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp
of knowledge-power on one hand, subjects produced as a result .”[8] These two opposed subjectivities map onto the disagreements over feminism embodied in Peoples’ sign:

of power, and on the other, those produced yet excluded as its powerless outside. Subjectivity as
remainder provides a potential model for resistance that , that which is left over after the productions of power, is a crucial turn in understanding resistance to power. It

doesn’t fall into the trap of conceiving of power as either purely repressive or productive. Peoples’
resistance avoids a complicit form of feminism while simultaneously avoiding a knowledge- , in turn, the apocalyptic thinking of

based masculine perspective .[9] While this leftover part of subjectivity aligns nicely with what Lacan calls objet petit a, I want to highlight the farcical aspect of being out of place, which isn’t totally absent from Peoples’ posture in the
photo. The dark humor of not fitting in and being unreadable can be described by what Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkole have called “the new LOL” ( Lacan on Laughter).[10]

For Lacan, stupidity can create a movement from discourses of mastery, like the University, to a state that lacks a lack and is characterized by enjoyment. He says in Seminar XX, “Knowledge is worth just as much as it costs [coute], a pretty penny [beau-coute], in that it takes elbow-grease, and that it’s difficult. Difficult to what? Less to acquire it than to enjoy it.”[11] In a capitalist knowledge discourse based on acquisition, knowledge is easy enough to have; you can just buy it, or if worst comes to worst, simply make it up. In the “post-truth” economy, consumers will just acquire whatever knowledge fits their worldview, whether it is made up or not. However, Lacan’s economy is strictly a non-capitalist one, since knowledge is reduced to exchange value without surplus-value or profit.[12] But what does it mean that it’s difficult to enjoy? Lacan doesn’t mean that knowledge, whether real or alternative facts, can lead to happiness; surely the opposite is often true, despite how many derive a sort of vulgar enjoyment from the absurdly made-up tweets and alternative facts coming from the Right. But to enjoy (jouir) is not about acquisition, and
not about not acquiring, but something “difficult” indeed: to relate to knowledge and the Other in a way that frustrates such a lack-based economy as such. Stupidity then is not about having or lacking knowledge (as in ignorance), but rather learning how to enjoy. Such a difficult enjoyment leads us through Lacan back to Freud; as Leo Bersani has shown, enjoyment in Freud is both about having and not having pleasure.[13] And since “jouir” also means “to orgasm” in French, Bersani likewise helps to show how Freud’s notion of drive is both pleasure and unpleasure: as pleasure, it is something to be acquired, but as unpleasure, it is something to be dispelled, through orgasm. What a politics of stupidity forces us to attempt to think is a “knowledge” that, to make a bad pun on Lacan’s jouissance and Derrida’s notion of politics, is “to come”: never final, never enjoyed too much, and always in tension.[14] Such a tension aligns stupidity not with the lack of ignorance, but rather with the almost unbearable presence of the Real.

But now it seems, like the movements of jouissance or the logic of a bad joke, that we’ve just gone in a circle. Wasn’t stupidity the problem that led to Trump? Isn’t such a politics of stupidity the very opposite of resistance? Doesn’t it run the risk of supporting and propping up the workings of power, just like Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis?” Is it possible to critique knowledge based discourses while simultaneously acknowledging those that historically have been marginalized from them? Instead of mistakenly thinking of speaking out as subversion, perhaps this thought experiment mistakenly thinks of humor, joking, and stupidity as subversion. In order to address these concerns, we now turn to a different trickste r, and a non-French one at that: Ishmael Reed.

Ishmael Reed isn’t afraid of stupidity, either as an aesthetic or as subject matter. In fact, he often turns specifically to joking, clowning, circuses, and stupidity, with his work ranging from detective stories to westerns, jazz recordings to postmodernis t verbal collages. Using language similar to Lacan, he states in a recent interview, “What we ended up doing in the sixties was to revolt against the colonial masters.”[15] But rather than seeking a new form of mastery, his stupidity is a specific and often razor-sharp critique of easy answers and political orthodoxies. His first novel, The Free-lance Pallbearers , explores the country of HARRY SAM, ruled by a man of the same name: a former used-car salesman who governs from a toilet, since “he has not been seen since the day thirty years ago when he disappeared into the John with a weird ravaging illness.”[16] (Reed anticipates Alec Baldwin’s Trump toilet tweeting joke by nearly 50 years.) The main character Bukka works as an orderly cleaning up bedpans (“Make-um-shit Doopeyduk”), and when he is eventually recruited to participate in political activist art, he protests “I’m not an actor. I’m more
of a clown” (4, 107). The artist’s response? “Good [….] So are we, tweet, tweet. See you soon” (107). (Again, more tweeting.) In his second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, a western about a voodoo cowboy named The Loop Garoo Kid, Reed satirizes orthodox “political” art in the form of Bo Shmo and the neo-socialist realist gang. The Kid sneers at their idea that “All art must be for the end of liberating the masses,” and instead asks, “What’s your beef with me Bo Shmo, what if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”[17] (Again, Reed is ahead of his time, with fiction subsuming the nightly news.) Reed’s most well known novel, Mumbo Jumbo, follows the “anti-plague” Jes Grew as it “ravages” the U.S. in the 1920s, causing energy, feelings of good health, an interest in Haitian culture , and uncontrollable dancing in the streets. The secrets of Jes Grew are bound in an ancient secret text called The Work; but as the title of the novel suggests, the Work isn’t a book that contains practical knowledge. In
fact, Papa LaBas, the novel’s main character and VooDoo detective, is never able to read the Work. But that’s fine with him; he concludes, “We will make our own future text.”[18] Reed’s stupidity, then, is never content with a final answer, even when that answer comes from one of Reed’s own books. Instead, his clowning, like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s theory of “signifying” derived from readings of Reed, is always premised on revision and on future action and future texts.[19]

But how does such stupidity actually work? Isn’t this just yet another instance of vulgar postmodernist critique? While Reed’s complex work escapes such an easy criticism , stupidity does seems to work best by pointing out a lack in ideological arguments that appeal to some ultimate truth. But politics and criticism aren’t so simple anymore, if they ever were. As Latour reminds us, “the danger [of the present] would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases!”[20] In other words , isn’t stupidity now precisely the problem instead of a critical solution?

At best, the stupidity of a figure like Trump doesn’t seem to be a major issue for many of his supporters ; as I write this, polls show his approval rating among
Republicans is still in the 80s. At worst, some of the most prominent praises of Trump take on precisely these postmodern terms: Trump as the one who “tells it like it is” and reveals “facts” as “bad ideology”; as a “blockage” to the “corrupt” system of Washington; as the big Other or
subject-supposed-to-know with no desire and no stable content, who creates desire in the (conservative, middle class, white) subject. As such, he is a figure who is stupid, not just in the traditional sense, but also in Lacan’s: by lacking any lack whatsoever, and thriving politically not

through policy or reason, but through desire and revealing the lack in others (Josh Marshall calls this a “domination by denigration” strategy.[21]) Furthermore, much of the direct moments of critique to Trump – criticisms of his “policies,”
have proved unsuccessful
debates, media interviews – , at least in preventing his rise to power. During the election, such resistance seemed to only galvanize him as a figure fighting against the “liberal elite,” i.e. those with knowledge. And even

millions persist in
though his approval ratings have fallen drastically, there are still who an enjoyment of his lack of knowledge: not only an enjoyment of ignorance, but also a sadistic enjoyment at the
suffering of those harmed by Trump’s policies .[22] Again, as Latour has pointed out, direct resistance runs the risk of becoming
caught up in the system of dominance . For an example, we need look no further than how “Black Lives Matter” has been co-opted in a precise Foucaultian reformulation of the biopolitical “Make Live and Let Die” – that is
to say, “All Lives Matter.” (A declaration of sovereignty so important that Trump repeated it during his acceptance of the Republican Presidential nomination.)

But perhaps, like fire-fighting fire, stupidity can combat stupidity . This is the point I wish to turn to in the following section. But first, it should be declared emphatically that this line of argument should in no way minimize the
forms of direct resistance that many have already undertaken. Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are doing extremely important work in leveling grass-roots public critiques. Indeed, in the past year, we have seen how these direct resistances have begun to affect the Trump
White House. Rather, this thought experiment is an attempt, to borrow more of Latour’s militaristic rhetoric, to open up an additional front in this battle; I wonder how tactics of stupidity might translate into the knowledge based discourses of Academia or the journalist media, which
have seemed somewhat powerless to speak truth to power against the Right.[23]

unreadability created a direct and effective critique of Trump

By way of beginning such translation, I want to highlight a moment of that , and one that importantly

doesn’t pit knowledge against stupidity , or truth against falsity. I’m referring here to Johari Osayi Idusuyi’s protest at a Trump rally in Nov. 2015, where she simply sat behind Trump while reading a copy of Claudia
Rankine’s Citizen. Idusuyi functions as both Lacanian blockage and as unreadable presence: a bit of the Lacanian Real.[24] She is present at least seemingly as a compliant supporter. Furthermore, she is often literally unreadable on camera precisely because she is reading with a book
obscuring her face. And unlike the other protesters at the rally, who attempted to directly confront Trump and his supporters and were violently ejected, Idusuyi instead merely exists (or “persists,” to borrow McConnell’s “critique” of Elizabeth Warren) within the space of the rally. But
through such existence, she makes all the Trump supporters around her visibly uncomfortable and distracted, yet unsure precisely how to respond to this woman calmly reading. Indeed, Rachel Maddow referred to Idusuyi as an “unbowable presence,” and this is precisely what the type

of political subjectivity I am trying to theorize: an unreadable yet unbowable presence, one that functions by both blocking the discursive system and refusing to be made a part of it. This “stupidity” is a far cry from ignorance; in Lacan’s terms, it is instead a lack of a
lack .[25]

Inside the book that Idusuyi was reading, Claudia Rankine tackles many of these same issues: presence, lack, black bodies, and alternative forms of knowing. Her poetry, like Idusuyi’s presence, is also often filtered through screens; the book contains reproductions of images from YouTube videos and sports matches. Reflecting on Hennessy Youngman’s YouTube performance pieces, which “[suggest] black people’s anger is marketable,” she writes,

You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy require d to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointme nt: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.[26]

While not specifically theorizing stupidity or clowning like Reed, Rankine negotiates a complex and dialectical form of knowledge: one that combines thinking with error and transforms nouns and feelings into verbs and actions, and vice versa. In so doing, she sublates “this other kind of anger” into a new form of knowledge, one that both “clarifies” and further muddies the waters. But that is precisely the point. This anger/knowledge is not valuable because of its clarification, corres ponde nce, or truth- value — it’s not a form of “alternative facts” — but rather because of its simply being there. The knowledge-as-presence that Rankine creates inside the book perfectly complements the presence- as-knowledge created by Idusuyi at the Trump rally. Of course, this knowledge isn’t simply utopian; it might not make a difference in “the ways in which one is perceived.” Rankine continues in the next paragraph: “Recognition of this lack might break you apart. Or recognition might illuminate the erasure the attempted erasure triggers. Whether such discerning creates a healthier, if more isolated, self, you can’t know” (24). The poetic recognition of
lack as breakage in Rankine is a very real concern for proteste rs, who risk the literal breaking of their bodies in the fight to be recognized. But what Rankine holds out is a hope that such erasure might lead to more erasure: that lack might create its own lack in return. Indeed, “recognition” and “illum ination” and “erasure” all become so mixed up that ultimately, “you can’t know.” But in that space of not-knowing — of attentiveness to the Other’s desires and our own lacks of the perfect answers — perhaps a politics of stupidity can begin.[27]
 is an urgent
Reflecting on the melancholia of critique, and the deadlock of the Left and the Right more generally, this new type of struggle -– characterized by stupidity, humor, and “unbowable presence” —

political and ethical necessity we . The resistor must realize that, along with Foucault, “We must not think that by saying yes to sex [and other prohibitions], one says no to power.”[28] But I would like to add here that

can’t just shout “No!” the political subject with unknowable integrity” any longer either (though we should definitely keep doing that too). In addition, “clownlike

must resist through unreadable presence ̶ and through the very act of reading her very perhaps too. We can thus draw a direct line from the
“unsuccessful” protests of Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2012, through the demands of Bernie Sanders, all the way to the recent Women’s Marches in Washington, D.C. Ishmael Reed’s “Future Text” ends up written by the bodies of the protestors; isn’t the galvanization of the Left to take to
the streets just like the “enlivening” anti-plague Jes Grew, “electric as life and […] characterized by ebullience and ecstasy” (6)? In shifting perspectives, many of the critiques against these protesters — that they are lazy and should get jobs, that they aren’t articulating coherent demands,
that their bodies aren’t really oppressed — are reformulated into the precise form of their resistance. As Rankine writes about tennis judge Mariana Alves’ notoriously bad (and seemingly racist) calls against Serena Williams, “Though no one was saying anything explicitly about Serena’s
black body, you are not the only viewer who thought it was getting in the way of Alves’s sight line” (27). Once again, she theorizes a form of literally unspoken knowledge that is found in the presence of a body as an obstruction to the dominant, white “sight line.” Lacan might even call
such an obstruction the gaze. And as both Rankine’s book and Idusuyi’s presence make clear, such a form of knowledge is present through reading.

In response to a President who tweets and doesn’t read, the unreadable presences of these readerly bodies in the streets is the perfect political response. For Lacan, in the final stage of his dialectic of desire, the subject confronts the lack in the big Other; when asked “What do you want of me?”, the big Other responds with “Nothing.” The protests against Trump reverse the terms. We might imagine a new slogan chanted at the next march:

“What do we want?”

“Nothing!”

“When do we want it?”

“NOW!”

Radical abortion rights activists in the 1960s

Of course, there are numerous literal demands that the protesters are fighting for. But such a demand for nothing is not without precedent.

presented the New York legislature with a blank piece of paper as their proposed bill, the implication
being that their bodies should not be regulated by laws in any way This posture of negativity locates .[29] , then,

power not in the figure of a new master, but in the bodies of the protestors themselves . Thus, demand
takes the form of a lack of a lack a demand that isn’t going away , but more importantly, of and a lack : one that obstructs “sight lines” through its “unbowable presence.”

Slavoj Žižek has termed this type of resistance “passive violence,” in response to the debate about whether it was OK to punch neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. (Žižek says no.)[30] But notwithstanding the schadenfreude of such violence, I have tried to shift the locus of passive violence to
stupidity, like the clowning of Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer. In so doing, I would also shift terms, both Žižek’s and my own from the early version of the paper: moving from active compliance to active, present stupidity. Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway, from the March 4th, 2017
Saturday Night Live, perfectly represents such a shift: instead of jokes or sketches, her character merely appears at brief moments throughout the broadcast, sitting in a red dress and playing with her phone, a perfect parody of the infamous “couchgate” photo of the real life Conway.[31]
This isn’t a joke per se: nothing is said, and McKinnon just repeats the same things that Conway did. But in so doing, she also enacts the same gesture of stupidity that ties these many disparate and complex forms of political resistance together as obstructive presence: from Reed’s Loop
Garoo Kid to Claudia Rankine, or from Johari Osayi Idusuyi to Melissa McCarthy. These disparate forms of stupidity return us, full circle, to Marx’s notion of history: first as tragedy, then as farce. Of course, we can’t overlook the complex histories and differences that inform these

a politics not only of stupidity, but ultimately

different acts of resistance.[32] But, taken together in a moment of contingency and solidarity, perhaps the different histories might lead to

togetherness: a togetherness that recognizes difference and the unreadability of the Other, but also
how that presence can still belong Lacan’s primary example for stupidity is love . In fact, silliness, , and nonsense .[33] Or as Rankine says towards the
close of her book, “You smile dumbly at the world because you are still feeling if only the feeling could be known and this brings on the moment you recognize as desire” (153).
 Interior Intersubjectivity
Our alternative is interior intersubjectivity
Viego 07 [Antonio Viego, Professor of Ethnic Studies @ Duke, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss
in Latino Studies, 2014, *brackets inserted for gendered language* //Stefan]

Briefly, for Lacan, the subject at the end of analysis is no longer a slave to the demand seen to issue from
the Other; the subject learns to assume responsibility for [themselves] by becoming [their] own cause,
as it were. For Spillers, the subject who vigorously practices an ‘‘interior intersubjectivity’’ achieves a
similar release from the Other insofar as he is no longer a slave to the demand that issues from race as a
structure of narrativity and signification that attempts to exhaust the meaning of human subjectivity.
She writes: The question, then, for this project is not so much why and how ‘‘race’’ makes the difference
—the police will see to it—but how it carries over its message onto an interior, how ‘‘race,’’ as a
poisonous idea, insinuates itself not only across and between ethnicities but within. What I am positing
here is the blankness of ‘‘race’’ where something else ought to be, that emptying out of which I spoke
earlier, the evacuation to be restituted and recalled as the discipline of a self-critical inquiry. In calling
this process an interior intersubjectivity, I would position it as a sort of power that countervails another
by an ethical decision.∞≤ The practice of interior intersubjectivity helps the speaking subject locate the
space in which race falsely dwells as a structure of narrativity and signification that attempts to explain
the nature of the human subject. At the same time, it helps evacuate and restitute that space for other
knowledge projects of ‘‘self-critical inquiry’’ that risk precipitating a nontransparent subject who can no
longer be wrestled down through the calculus of race. Simply and forcefully, interior intersubjectivity
concerns rescuing the blank space that race somehow came to fill in the constitutive work of subjectivity
formation in order to reclaim it as a surface of inscription for other interpretative efforts. The
homologous critical operations performed in Spillers and Lacan precipitate a kind of subject who is
necessarily dispersed, decentralized, and in disarray. In the last paragraph in her essay, Spillers writes,
‘‘My interest in this ethical self-knowing wants to unhook the psychoanalytic hermeneutic from its
rigorous curative framework and try to recover it in a free-floating realm of self-didactic possibility that
might decentralize and disperse the knowing one.’’∞≥ Toward the end of Seminar VII, Lacan notes, ‘‘At
the end of a training analysis the subject should reach and should know the domain and the level of the
experience of absolute disarray. It is a level at which anguish is already a protection, not Abwarten as
Erwartung. Anguish develops by letting a danger appear, whereas there is no danger at the level of the
final experience of Hilflosigkeit [helplessness].’’∞∂ Lacan’s notion of disarray is internal to what Spillers
calls ‘‘decentralization’’ and ‘‘dispersal.’’ It is this disarray—Spillers’s attempt to decentralize the ego
and thus undermine its pretension to mastery as the center of consciousness as well as her attempt to
promote the subject’s dispersal into spaces of possibility outside its incarceration in solitary Imaginary
confinement—that the ethnic-racialized subject must experience in order to understand that [they are]
a subject of the signifier who is incalculable, indeterminate, and always in the process of becoming.
Lacan’s and Spillers’s homologous critical approaches to theorizing the dispersed, decentralized subject
in disarray are also revealed in the nature of the kind of interpretative labor each thinks must be
performed, one that is not curative in nature nor in the service of amplifying the ego. She writes, I have
chosen to call this strategy the interior intersubjectivity, which I would, in turn, designate as the locus at
which self-interrogation takes place. It is not an arrival but a departure, not a goal but a process, and it
conduces toward neither an answer nor a ‘‘cure,’’ because it is not engendered in formulae and
prescriptions. More precisely, its operations are torque-like to the extent that they throw certainty and
dogma (the static, passive, monumental aim) into doubt. This process situates a content to work on as a
discipline, as an askesis, and I would specify it on the interior because it is found in economy but is not
exhausted by it. Persistently motivated in inwardness, in-flux, it is the ‘‘mine’’ of social production that
arises, in part, from interacting with others, yet it bears the imprint of a particularity.∞∑ What Spillers
has in mind is not the working on the subject that would resemble the reconsolidation of the ego’s
masterful powers or the restoration of the ego as whole, ‘‘It is not an arrival but a departure, not a goal
but a process.’’∞∏ This strategy has to do with frontally challenging the fixity and rigidity that
characterizes the ego’s resistance to subjective growth and change: ‘‘its operations are torque-like to
the extent that they throw certainty and dogma (the static, passive, monumental aim) into doubt.’’∞π
Her specification of an interior as that which is ‘‘in economy’’ but not exhausted by it indirectly critiques
the more routine approach to ethnic-racialized subjectivity and experience through explications attuned
solely to social, cultural, and historical but not psychical analyses. Her use of the term, askesis reminds
one of how Lacan characterized psychoanalysis’s species of interpretative labor. In ‘‘The Function and
Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,’’ Lacan writes, ‘‘Of all the undertakings that have been
proposed in this century, the psychoanalyst’s is perhaps the loftiest, because it mediates in our time
between the care-ridden man and the subject of absolute knowledge. This is also why it requires a long
subjective ascesis, indeed one that never ends, since the end of training analysis is not separable from
the subject’s engagement in his practice.’’∞∫ Although throughout her essay Spillers speaks generally of
psychoanalysis, sometimes referring to ‘‘classical psychoanalytic theory’’ and mentioning the names of
both Freud and Lacan, I see her model as primarily Lacanian. Spillers wants to pursue the ethnic-
racialized subject’s signifying dependence. Understanding the nature of that dependence and the
signifying elements that constitute the subject’s symbolic universe are precisely the nature of the
interpretative labor that Spillers has in mind: ‘‘The one that I am after, then, must be built up from the
ground, so to speak, inasmuch as classical psychoanalytic theory and its aftermath contradictorily point
toward it—a subject in its ‘signifying dependence,’ which means that the subject’s profound
engagement with, and involvement in, symbolicity is everywhere social.’’∞Ω Now that we have
unpacked some of the essential elements that make up Spillers’s psychoanalytic hermeneutic practice of
interior intersubjectivity, I want to explore the specific relation between what Spillers refers to in the
passage above as ‘‘a subject in its ‘signifying dependence’’’ and the larger goal announced in the
practice of interior intersubjectivity: the ‘‘evacuation,’’ ‘‘that emptying out’’ of race ‘‘where something
else ought to be’’ in an effort to compel new modes of ‘‘self-critical inquiry’’ not determined by the
calculus of race. There is an exceedingly seductive, utopic charge to the project of emptying the space
filled by race. It implies that the subject’s signifying dependence on race would no longer exist, insofar
as race in the position of the Other—to continue mining the similarity between Spillers’s subject and the
subject at the end of the Lacanian analysis—whose demand we think we are still called upon to respond
to has been evaporated. Seshadri-Crooks sharply describes the stubborn ways in which we continue to
hold on to the idea of race: As a system of organizing difference, race is very distinctive in relation to
other forms of organization such as caste, ethnicity and nation. It is distinctive as a belief structure and
evokes powerful and very particular investments in subjects. Consider the peculiar intensification of
racial identification and racial discourse even as the scientific untenability of race is ever more insisted
upon by scientists and anthropologists. Even though it has now become commonplace to utter rote
phrases such as ‘‘race is a construct’’ or ‘‘race does not exist,’’ etc., race itself shows no evidence of
disappearing or evaporating in relevance. It is common sense to believe in the existence of race. Why do
we hold on to race? What is it about race that is difficult to give up?≤≠ Seshadri-Crooks’s questions
appear not to bode well for Spillers’s ultimate goal. The positing of ‘‘the blankness of ‘race’ where
something else ought to be’’ might be an impossible task that when actively engaged may in fact serve
only to perpetuate the ongoing hallucination of race in new and no less damaging disguises. I want to
return to one sentence from Spillers’s essay and read it in a way that would suggest less tension
between Seshadri-Crooks’s insight and Spillers’s goal. Again, Spillers writes, ‘‘What I am posting here is
the blankness of ‘race’ where something else ought to be, that emptying out of which I spoke earlier,
the evacuation to be restituted and recalled as the discipline of a selfcritical inquiry.’’≤∞ If we agree that
race may register in any number of ways but ‘‘blankness’’ won’t be one of them, then we could still
understand the ‘‘discipline of a self-critical inquiry’’ as an interpretative practice that understands that
race won’t disappear any time soon. A scrutinous analysis of its stubborn hold on us and its ongoing role
in the constitution of human subjectivity are the ‘‘something else’’ that Spillers is after. She names this
discipline ‘‘interior intersubjectivity,’’ a hermeneutic strategy that, although it may not render race
blank, will lay bare the processes—psychical, social, economic, and political— that explain to us why
race won’t budge, why, to return to Seshadri-Crooks’s words, it ‘‘shows no evidence of disappearing or
evaporating in relevance.’’≤≤ Spillers imagines her hermeneutic as a species of psychoanalytics, since
race cannot be addressed simply through historicist genealogies that describe its discursive
construction. I think Spillers believes, like Seshadri-Crooks, that race makes certain constitutive psychical
claims on our existence that don’t simply go away because we describe, ad nauseam, its scientific
untenability, its social constructedness, its variability over time and cultures, and so on. The discussion
so far, in focusing on Spillers, was supposed to have broached only the speculative perspective on
ethnic-racialized subjectivity in the context of psychoanalysis, as I positioned Spillers as representing the
speculative and not the clinical. Yet the reader will surely have noticed how Spillers’s approach has
effectively broken down that opposition and even reconfigured it.
A2
 AT: Spill Up
There is no relation between their education and agency – makes us worse academics
and activists
Schlag ‘3 (Pierre Schlag, Professor of Law at University of Colorado, University of Miami Law Review
Vol 57:1029, “A Reply – The Missing Portion”, 4/1/2003)\\AK
FALSE EMPOWERMENT (No. 1) From the very first day, law school training leads law students to believe that judicial decisions produce important consequences for
the social order. The
presumption is that the words of the judge (if they are well crafted) will effectively
produce a social reality that corresponds roughly with the words uttered. But what reason is there to believe this?3 FALSE
EMPOWERMENT (No. 2) The endlessly repeated question in first year, "What should the court do?" leads law

students to believe that courts respond to the force of the better argument . This would be tolerable if
one added two provisos: 1. The better argument often means little more than the one the courts are
predisposed to believe; and 2. In the phrase "force of better argument " it's important to attend not just
to the "better" part, but to the other term as well. FALSE EMPOWERMENT (No. 3) Law students first learn of many complex social and
economic realities through the medium of case law. What they learn is thus the law's vision of these economic and social realities. Not surprisingly, there is an
almost magical correspondence between legal categories and social or economic practices. This magical fit leads law students (later to become law professors) to
have an extremely confident view of the efficacy of law. Many law students are cured of this belief-structure by a stay in the legal clinic or by law practice.4 There is
one group of people, however, who are generally not cured of this belief-structure at all, but whose faith is actually intensified. These are the people who hold
prestigious judicial clerkships where an emotional proximity to and identification with their judge ("my judge") leads to an even greater confidence in the efficacy of
law. These people are frequently chosen to teach in law schools. FALSE EMPOWERMENT (No. 4) False empowerment can be disempowering. It can also lead to
pessimism and despair. Many people react to a loss of faith in law or legal studies with despair or pessimism. But this is the despair and pessimism that comes from
giving up a naive or a romantic vision of law and/or legal studies. The onslaught of this despair and pessimism is a good thing. It is like the thirty-something who
realizes that he is mortal and that life is brief. Generally, this is not welcome news. PESSIMISM, DESPAIR, ETC. (No. 2) When
the academic loses
faith in law or legal studies, typically that person is most troubled because she has lost the framework
that makes her academic project possible. But so what? Isn't the demand that law conform to an academic project arguably a selfish one?
THE CON, THE JOKE, AND THE IRONIC TRUTH The Con: In the courtroom, the appellate judge is typically seated behind an elevated bench. On the classroom
blackboard the appellate judge is chalked in above the plaintiff and the defendant. This is both a reflection and a reinforcement of the belief that the appellate judge
is an intellectually and politically privileged legal actor. The Joke: In actuality, the appellate judge is a person who operates in conditions of severe information
deficits and whose outlook is thoroughly manipulated by professional rhetoricians. Very often he has little or no understanding of the configurations of the social
field to which his rulings will apply. What's more, this is a person who is prohibited from talking about the social field, except with a highly restricted number of
people. The Ironic Truth: On the other hand, because we believe the appellate judge is a particularly privileged intellectual and political actor, we contribute to
making him so. A CRUEL HOAX Legal
intellectuals like to believe that law is an intelligent enterprise. They like to
believe that the law offers an interesting vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric through which to think
about the world and law itself. This is naive. The political demand that law be efficacious means that law must track, must indeed incorporate
popular beliefs about social and economic identities, causation, linguistic meaning, and so forth. (Those beliefs are often intellectually bereft.)THE ARGUMENT
ROOM The argument room is a place where academic advocates go to argue passionately about law and
politics. (Apologies to Monty Python.) Within the room, arguments are won and lost; triumphs and defeats are had.
But generally, no one outside the room pays much attention to what goes on inside the room.
Sometimes there is seepage and fragments of the conversations are heard outside the room.
Participants most often spend their time arguing about what should happen outside the room. This they
call "knowledge" or "understanding" or "jurisprudence" or "scholarship" or "politics." The one thing that
generally cannot be talked about inside the room is the construction of the room itself . POLITICS (No. 1) For
progressive legal thinkers, politics is a "theoretical unmentionable": The concept "politics" does a great deal of theoretical work

and yet its identity remains generally immune from scrutiny. The categories (right, left) and the fundamental grammar of politics
(progress, reaction, and so forth) generally go unquestioned. Oddly, while everything else seems to be contingent, conditional, contextual, and so on, the categories
of politics seem to be oddly stable, nearly transcendent. Strangely, this occurs at a time when the categories, left and right (and even politics itself), seem
increasingly fragile and non-referential. Still, this is an intensely political time-political not in the sense of significant social contestation (not much of that) nor in the
sense of ideological struggle (not happening much either). Rather, political in the sense of very significant reorganizations and reallocations of power, wealth, and so
on.5 Capital (for lack of a better term) is in a period of rapid self-reorganization in which it increasingly regiments precincts of life previously offering some
resistance to its grammar-to wit: time, family, media, public space, wilderness, and so forth. The point is not that these precincts were immune to capital before, but
rather that capital is advancing at such an intense rate to bring about a significant disruption and a qualitative change in these precincts. This change is manifest not
only in the colonization of new precincts, but in the self-organization of capital(new financial vehicles) and, of course, in new literary and intellectual forms
(postmodernism as both symptom and diagnosis). Meanwhile, the old categories, the old grammar, the old answers, seem to have lost some of their hold. The right
is intellectually stagnant. And the left is, as a social presence, ontologically challenged. Indeed, in the United States, we seem at present to have several right wings
and no left wing. This does not mean that "politics" as a social category is necessarily dead. It might mean simply that we (and others) have not understood, have
not grasped, have not articulated its new configurations. What would be required on the intellectual level is a re-evaluation not only of the conventionally
articulated categories, but of the social and economic ontology. At its best, postmodernism (and there has been a lot of bad reactionary and nostalgic
postmodernism) is an attempt to trigger such a re-evaluation. Progressives, understandably, strive to protect their categories, grammar, and self-image from these
challenges. But this is not without cost. POLITICS (No. 2) To argue in favor of political positions is sometimes political. But it is not always political. Sometimes taking
up a political argument is political and sometimes it has no consequences whatsoever. One cannot know beforehand. But it is a serious mistake to suppose that
arguing in favor of a political position is in and of itself political. Very
often in the legal academy, to argue for a political (or
normative) position is not political at all. It simply triggers a scholastic, highly stereotyped meta-
discourse about whether the arguments advanced are sound, accurate, should be adopted , or the like. A
PROBLEM FOR THE LEFT Traditionally, the left has defended the victims of capitalism, imperialism, and racism. Indeed, this is an important part of what it means to
be "on the left."
Meanwhile, in the university, scholarly attention depends upon the production of new
exciting ideas and research agendas. This poses a problem for the left: the victims of capitalism,
imperialism, and racism remain the same. The political-intellectual defenses advanced on behalf of victims remain the same. This leads
to a certain sense of weariness and dfjA vu-stereotyped arguments, standard rhetorical moves. A
tendency to fight the same old fights. Machines. This is a problem. A PROBLEM FOR PROGRESSIVE LEGAL THINKERS As the author of Laying
Down the Law, it just isn't clear to me that law is the sort of thing that is endlessly perfectible. At times it seems to me that law is a lot like military strategy. You can
try making military strategy the best it can be (maybe you should). But when you get done it's still going to be military strategy. In that context it would be a good
thing to have a few people (I volunteer) to be less than completely enthralled by military strategy. The same would go for law. It could be that law is objectionable in
important respects because, well... it's law. If you are going to mediate social contradictions through a linguistically normalized system of organized institutional
force (e.g., law) you should not expect the results to be pretty (no matter how humane or contextual you get along the way). LAW AS A WHITE MALE PRODUCTION
It seems worthwhile to have a few people focus on the production side of law's equations-how is this law produced, what versions of self does it enact, how does it
reproduce itself, how does it achieve rhetorical supremacy, how does it mediate its various crises, etc. etc. etc. In my work-the construction of the subject, anti-
disciplinarity, the critique of normativity, the enchantment of reason, the politics of form, the aesthetics-I have been concerned with these kinds of questions. I
think there is a politics to that-however incomplete, unfinished, elliptical, underdetermined, and open-ended it might be.6 POLITICS AS ARROGANCE As
a legal
thinker, I believe in trying to do something that has intellectual, political, or aesthetic value. Any one of
the three would be just great-a real success, something worthy of respect. This is especially so because,
given the institutional paths laid out by the legal academy, it's pretty easy to strike out.7But if one has a
choice, which should one pursue? Perhaps it depends upon where one thinks one can advance, say, or
do something worthwhile. This will depend upon a person's talents and field as well as his/her
estimation of context and possibilities. From this standpoint it seems odd that someone should feel
authorized to say: "You should do X” LEGAL THOUGHT AS ARROGANCE The belief is that the future of the free world,
the maintenance of the rule of law, the welfare of the republic, the liberation of oppressed peoples, the
direction of the Court, the legitimacy of the Florida election, hangs on a law professor's next article . This is
the esprit serieux gone nuts. The most significant effect of this belief is to arrest thought and end the play of ideas

necessary for creativity. SERIOUS AND NOT (No. 1) Yes, legal interpretation sometimes takes place in a field of pain and death.9 But that hardly means
that legal studies takes place in a field of pain and death. It is a residual objectivism that enables legal academics to believe that when they write about law-what it is
or what it should be-they are somehow engaged in the same enterprise as judges. They're not. It is not that legal scholarship is without consequence. It's just that
the institutional and rhetorical contexts are sufficiently different that the consequences are different as well. SERIOUS AND NOT (No. 2) There is an important,
indeed foundational, category mistake that sustains American legal thought-it is the supposition that because academics and judges deploy the same vocabulary
and the same grammar, they are involved in largely the same enterprise. I just don't think that's true. My own view is that legal academics are but one social group
(among many) competing for the articulation of what law is. Judges are another. Social movements, corporations, public interest groups, administrative officials,
criminals, etc., are some of the others. ° For most of the history of the American law school, academics have anointed judges as privileged speakers of law. In turn,
legal academics have adopted the habits, forms of thought, and rhetoric of judges-thereby accruing to themselves the authority to say what the law is. Legal
academics legitimate their claim to say what the law is by fashioning law as an academic discipline requiring expertise. Legal academics then hold themselves out as
possessing this expertise. Among those critical theorists who seek to contest this expertise, one can distinguish two approaches. One approach is to try to reveal the
emptiness of the claims to expertise among the legal intelligentsia and to reveal how these claims nonetheless gain power. Another approach is to try to relocate
the authority to say what the law is among those who have been excluded. I do not see these approaches as antithetical, but rather as complementary.
Furthermore, both approaches will in fact reinscribe, will performatively reinforce, precisely the sort of rhetorics and hierarchies they contest. No way around that. I
think critical thinkers all do this-though in different ways. And it's certainly worthwhile pointing out how it is being done. ' At the same time, no one is safe or
immune from this sort of criticism. SERIOUS AND NOT (No. 3) To learn to laugh at what is taken seriously, but is not serious, is a serious thing to do. To take seriously
what is not, is a drag. A PROBLEM FOR PROGRESSIVES Progressives wish to pursue a politics that is efficacious. This means keeping track both of the social context in
which progressivism articulates itself (on the side of the subject), and the social context in which progressivism seeks to register its results (on the side of the
object). But this work of reconnaissance-a work that is necessarymay bring unwelcome news: namely that progressivism unmodified is no longer a terribly cogent
project. Choices will have to be made: to defend progressive thought against this unwelcome news or to put the identity of progressive projects at risk by
encountering this unwelcome news. FORMALISM (OR PIERRE MENARD'S LAW REVIEw ARTICLE) Formalism is virtually an inexorable condition of legal scholarship in
the following sense: a legal academic generally writes scholarship outside the social pressures of what a lawyer would call real stakes, real clients, or real
consequences. The failure of an argument in the pages of the Stanford Law Review is generally very different from the failure of an argument in a brief or an
opinion. The difference in context changes the character and consequences of the acts-even if the authors use exactly the same words. BINARY AND NOT
(INSIDERIOUTSIDER, IMMANENT/TRANSCENDENT, MIND/BODY ETC. ETC. ETC.) It's one thing to deploy oppositional binarism to describe the broad structures of a
text. It's quite another to adopt binarism as an intellectual lifestyle choice.12 Oppositional binarism has a special hold/appeal in American law precisely because: 1)
law is often identified with what appellate courts say it is; and 2) by the time a case gets to an appellate court, the reductionism of litigation and the binary structure
of the adversarial orientation has reduced the dispute to an either/or (e.g., liberty vs. equality or formal equality vs. substantive equality, and so on). But ....
Oppositional binarism flounders because law does not have fixed, uncontroversial grids. Hence, for instance, the notion that a person is an insider or an outsider just
doesn't track with much of anything (except perhaps the author's own formalism). If one thinks about it, a person is an insider in this respect (he's white) but an
outsider in that respect (he's working class) and then an insider with respect to his pedigree (he went to Columbia) but really an outsider within his insider Columbia
status because he was profoundly alienated from the Columbia social scene and blah blah blah. After a while (very soon, actually) the insider/outsider distinction
loses its hold. The point is, unless you happen to have a well-formed, non-overlapping fixed grid (and this would be a very strange thing for a critical theorist to
have!), oppositional binarism (like everything else) ultimately collapses. Interestingly, there was a moment of slippage in the history of critical legal studies (or
perhaps the fem-crits) when binary oppositionalism slid from a heuristic into (of all things) a metaphysic! THE MACHINES In Keith Aoki's comic strip, the agents of
R.E.A.S.O.N. and P.I.E.R.R.E. fight each other in a comically clich6d fashion. It is Nick Fury jurisprudence. And there is something strikingly right about that (however
humbling it may be for me and others). One of the things that happens in the Nick Fury comic strips (as in Keith Aoki's contribution) is that the
antagonists
deploy machines against each other. In legal thought, we have a lot of machines in operation.1 3 By this
I mean that a great deal of so-called legal thought is not really thought at all-but the deployment of a
series of rhetorical operations over and over again to perform actions (usually destructive in character)
on other peoples' texts or persons. Every argument tends to become a machine. Over time, legal
academics tend to become their own arguments. Then, of course, they become their own machines.
 AT: PDB
The success of the alternative depends on its ability to distance itself from fantasmatic
politics
- The K’s only radical because it eschews fantasmic policies like the aff

Stavrakakis, prof govt, 99 [Yannis—visiting fellow University of Essex, Lacan and the Political]
In fact, articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance of
Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political
insights implicit in Lacan's reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a
recent article in Radical Philosophy. Collier's argument is that since it is capitalism that shatters our wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia;
obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacan's theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because alienation
is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (`Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals', my emphasis).19 Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical
politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: 'Let us go to Freud
and Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our lines crossed' (Collier, 1998: 41-3). Surprisingly

It is
enough this is almost identical with Homer's conclusion: Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism!

clear that from a Lacanian point of view it is necessary to resist all such reoccupations' of traditional
fantasmatic politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the
alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond identification.
Since utopian or quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to
draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the 'reoccupation' of the traditional strategy of
identification – although it recognises its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivity –
why should psychoanalytic politics, after unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional,
fantasmatic, identificatory politics, 'reoccupy' their ground? This rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away from what
Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the 'local sense of politics' in Beardsworth's

In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all
terminology:

political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact
generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes
a radical 'critique' of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996: 19) Similarly, the radicality and political
importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from fantasmatic
politics, from politics in the traditional sense; which is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is
apolitical: in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics, exactly because, as
argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-utopian
sedimentations of political reality.

All perms fail—sustaining any kind of positivity of the aff undermines the goal of the
alt. Any kind of optimism towards aff solvency defeats the purpose.
McGowan 2013 [Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska
Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013] // afre

Th e great challenge that psychoanalysis poses for emancipatory politics — and for politics as such — is its absolute
rejection of the good or the good society. In the opening of the Politics, Aristotle describes the good as the basic aim of political activity, and this aim has
remained constant in the intervening 2,500 years.7 Aristotle never att empts to prove this constitutive remark in his treatise but simply takes it as an unassailable postulate of political thinking.
For subsequent political thinkers, the question does not concern Aristotle’s claim about the good but in what the good consists. Th ere is unanimity about the political pursuit of the good not

just among political theorists but among almost everyone who thinks about politics at all. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, however,
there is no good at all. Th e good society is unatt ainable not just as a result of the competing desires of the individuals within the society. Th e
theory that aligns social confl ict with the coexistence of competing individual desires fails to go far enough in envisioning the antagonistic nature of the social order . No matt er how divergent
individual desires are, one could always imagine reconciling them with each other through some sort of compromise. A thinker such as John Rawls can imagine a just society despite positing a
society divided by innumerable competing desires on the level of the individual. Justice here would consist in the idea of fairness — using one’s imagination to envision society through what
Rawls labels a “veil of ignorance” that allows one to make decisions about justice without taking into account one’s individual interests or desires or social position.8 Th is would facilitate a

But the barrier to the good society runs

good society in which any inequality would be socially justifi ed, and it would thus reconcile competing individual desire

deeper than this. It derives from the very idea of the good , which Freud sees as fundamentally at odds with itself. Th e good itself, not our

failures to achieve it, is the problem . Th is is the fundamental political insight that psychoanalysis brings to the table. It is at once the
challenge that it poses to emancipatory politics and the basis for its implicit project for emancipation . As
we get closer to the ideal of a good society, we simultaneously approach the emptiness concealed
within the ideal. Th e notion of the good does not emerge simply from moral reasoning and speculation
about the proper arrangement of society. We develop this notion only through the experience of its prohibition. Th at is to say, the prohibition of the good
doesn’t form an obstacle to a preexisting ideal but constitutes the ideal as such. Th e good has no existence outside of the barriers that we erect around realizing it. As Jacques Lacan points out
in one of his most important political statements, “Th e step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good — that the Sovereign Good,
which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by

Freud.”9 Th e foundational link between the good and prohibition renders its pursuit completely
contradictory. Every step toward the good occasions a corresponding step away from it. Th e closer we
come, the more we undermine the social stability that we hoped to achieve. Th is occurs not just among
the many utopian socialist projects that have failed but across all types of social structures. For psychoanalysis, the good is not just an unrealizable
ideal but a deception incapable of orienting a coherent and sustainable politics. Th is critique threatens to undermine the very idea of a

political project because political theorists write in order to help bring about change, which means
moving society in the direction of the good (even if they admit that the ideal itself is not realizable). Conservative theorists seem immune to this critique,
but they envision a return to the good or the creation of a social stability that they associate implicitly with the good.10 Political theorists of all stripes write to

change the world and assist its progression (or its return to a better state), whereas psychoanalysis interprets the
world and uncovers the repetition at work where it seems to be progressing. For this reason, Julia Kristeva theorizes the
political project inherent in psychoanalysis as one of permanent revolt. Rather than forming a positive program, psychoanalysis, like

modernist literature, exists simply as a negation of identity and power . In Th e Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, she argues,
“psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and a certain literature, on the other, perhaps constitute possible instances of revolt culture.” 11 From
Kristeva’s point of view, psychoanalysis is completely political insofar as it demands revolt, but this revolt can never become revolution. Psychoanalytic revolt is destined to remain revolt
against some existing power structure toward which it will continue to provide resistance. Kristeva views psychoanalytic thought as a hiccup in the hegemony of scientifi c rationality and
progress. Any att empt to create a positive psychoanalytic politics would obviate its role as a key part of revolt culture.
 AT: Perm Non-ME
This is silly— The whole point of our framework and other perm competition args is
that the aff and the alternative are mutually-exclusive strategies – still severs or links
The plan cannot be detached from its discursive underpinnings
Burke, 07 – Anthony, Ph. D in International Relations and Political Science from the Australian National
University, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South
Wales, Political theorist and IR scholar, “Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence”, pgs 3-4

the reasons for pursuing a critical analysis

It is clear that traditionally coercive and violent approaches to security and strategy are both still culturally dominant, and politically and ethically suspect. However,

relate not only to the most destructive approaches, such as the war in Iraq, but also to their or controversial

available alternatives. There is a necessity to question not merely extremist versions such as
(and generally preferable)

the Bush doctrine or Israeli expansionism, but also their mainstream critique whether they take
, Indonesian militarism s-

the form of liberal policy approaches sensitivity to cultural in international relations (IR), just war theory, US realism, optimistic accounts of globalisation, rhetorics of

difference, or centrist security discourses based on territorial compromise with the Palestinians. The
Israeli

surface appearance of lively debate masks a deeper agreement about major concepts,
(and often significant) forms of political identity

and the imperative to secure them. Debates mask a more about when and how it may be effective and legitimate to use military force in tandem with other policy options, for example,

fundamental discursive consensus about the meaning of security the nature of progress , the effectiveness of strategic power, , the

or the promises of national

value of freedom identity political debate about insecurity, violent conflict
and cultural . As a result, and intellectual

and injustice can become hostage to a claustrophic structure of political and ethical possibility that
global

systematically wards off critique.

 A2: I won’t goat
When striving to attain their desired object, people don’t make decisions about group
violence rationally
Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis Stavrakakis has PhD degrees from the ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’
programme at the University of Essex, “Lacan and the Political”, p.94-95, 10/3/99)

What is at stake is enjoyment (jouissance) If the effects of the normative

in the Lacanian conception of fantasy , as we have already pointed out, .

idealist or Enlightenment-style critique of racism are severely limited, if this critique is not enough (Lipowatz,

this is because
1995a:213), it has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to
, to use one of Sloterdijki’s formulations,

expose it didn’t take into account that what is at stake here is not rational
(Sloterdijk, 1988:3). In its rationality it has exhausted itself. In other words,

argumentation but the organisation and administration of enjoyment : The impotence of the attitude of
traditional Enlightenment is best exemplified by the anti- racist who, at the level of rational
argumentation, produces a series of convincing reasons against the racist Other, but is nonetheless
clearly fascinated by the object of his critique and all his defence disintegrates in the moment of consequently,

real crisis (when the fatherland is in danger for example) .

Their framework arguments are worse – they’re not just not falsifiable, but fail every
standard of social theory
Mutz ‘8 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, “Is
Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?”, Annual Review of Political Science Vol. 11: 521-538,
2/19/2008)

Falsifiability is probably the single most intransigent issue in getting normative theory and empirical
research to speak to one another in the realm of deliberative theory. Several problems conspire to make
deliberative theory elusive in this respect. For some theorists, deliberation is simply defined as
intrinsically good. Obviously, such a claim renders empirical research irrelevant (see, e.g., Stokes 1998).
But even without the assumption of intrinsic goodness, more complex problems hinder the interaction
between empirical studies and political theory. It is difficult to envision an empirical test that might
produce evidence construed by theorists and empiricists alike as disconfirming the claims of deliberative
theory. This is because deliberation falls short on many of the standards deemed essential to good social
science theory, at least as the theory is currently construed. Beyond the general issue of falsifiability,
deliberative theory falls short of meeting three requirements for productive social theory that are
enumerated in virtually any textbook: 1. clearly defined concepts; 2. specification of logical relationships
among concepts within the theory; 3. consistency between hypotheses and evidence accumulated to
date. It is, of course, unfair to criticize a normative theory for lacking the characteristics required of
productive social science theory. But criticism is not my main purpose. Instead, I want to take seriously
the admonition that the two subfields should talk to one another. To make a dialogue possible, this
normative theory must be translated into the terminology of empirical social science and must then be
subjected to the standards of theory testing within the social science tradition. It is crucial to address
these three problems in order to accumulate useful empirical evidence on the potential of deliberative
democracy. Social scientists generally define “theory” as a set of interrelated statements intended to
explain and/or make predictions about some aspect of social life. Toward those ends, a good theory is
supposed to have well-defined constructs of general theoretical interest. It is supposed to describe
logical associations among these constructs (which are most often causal associations), and it should
allow for connections between the theoretical constructs and observable entities. When theories cannot
meet these three criteria, they are generally unproductive in advancing our understanding of the
phenomenon of interest.2 What happens when empirical researchers attempt to translate deliberative
theory into these terms? First, as Thompson points out, they discover a great deal of conceptual
ambiguity as to what should qualify as deliberation . Moreover, the definitions offered by theorists
frequently conflate causes (criteria defining deliberation) and effects (its beneficial consequences).
Second, the tests of deliberative theory offered to date typically do not develop well-specified
explanations for the relationships between deliberation and its many proposed benefits. Third,
deliberative theory is inconsistent with much of what is already known about political discourse in group
contexts. Many, though not all, of the hypotheses that flow from the deliberative framework are not
well-grounded in either previous theory or empirical evidence.

The repetitive nature of the economy of tropes and enjoyment prove that
psychoanalysis is falsifiable – specifically in the context of rhetoric
Lundberg 12 (Christian Lundberg is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, “Lacan in Public:
Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric,” 11/26/12) AqN
One of the most hallowed maxims of rhetorical studies is that rhetoric is an art—a techne for engaging discourse in the properly Aristotelian sense of the term. Techne implies a systematic mode of experiential knowledge, but

While for much of

often in declaring that rhetoric is an art, the accent of this declaration falls on the intuitive and the experiential facets of techne at the expense of the more systematic charge inherent in it.

the rhetorical tradition, techne has primarily taken the valence of a prudential guide for intuitive
judgment, Lacan turns to rhetoric to confer on psychoanalysis a scientific status . Lacan’s claims to the
“science” of rhetoric respond to a number of critics who had framed psychoanalysis as an alchemical mix
of unfounded theories, intuitions and inherited practices. Borrowing from Karl Popper’s philosophy of
science, such critiques of psychoanalysis argued that analytic practice was non-falsifiable , resting on the
idea that no empirical evidence could be mustered to refute it. Any claim to evidence to the contrary of Freudian theories could always be elided by
generating another explanation with dubious empirical grounding to account for potential exceptions. In drawing on rhetoric as a systematic mode for theorizing the nature of the sign, representation, and the logic and social

functions of discourse , Lacan rescues Freudian categories from non-falsifiability . Rhetoric , which is so squarely rooted in “art,”

became one of Lacan’s most powerful allies in articulating psychoanalysis as a science,

providing a vocabulary for attending to the repeatable elements of signification that
might be held up to empirical verification. Lacan vacillated at different points in his career on psychoanalysis’s status as a science, arguing at points that it was
clearly a science, at others that it was not, and at others that it was a special kind of science.61 Generally, Lacan’s early career embodied the strongest claim for the scientific status of psychoanalysis, while in his later career he

What is most interesting about the ambivalence

became less invested in the idea, arguing that it need not attempt to assume scientific status to validate itself.62

toward science in Lacan’s thought is that at each instance where the relationship between
psychoanalysis and science is at stake, the question of rhetoric is never far from the conversation . For example,
in The Psychoses and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is a science on the basis of its attention to a set of repeatable logical forms, specifically to trope as a way of specifying the
possible connections underwriting discursive and representational practices. Other accounts read Lacan as eventually giving up on the idea that psychoanalysis is a science, but do so, once again, with explicit reference to rhetoric.
For example, Stuart Schneiderman argues that by 1977 Lacan had given up the quest to prove psychoanalysis as a science, that “after having posed the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis for so many years, he had
come to the conclusion that it was not a science. The reason was one offered by Karl Popper, namely that psychoanalysis was ‘irrefutable.’ Lacan said that analysis was closest to rhetoric. . . . Thus analysis seeks to persuade but not
convince, to persuade the analysand to recognize things that he knows already and to act on his desire.”63 Of course, one might take issue with the account of rhetoric that is implicit in this claim, particularly on the grounds that
the framing of rhetoric in Schneiderman’s account affirms an understanding of rhetoric exclusively through reference to persuasion, contingency, and probability—a conception that is, as I have been arguing, at odds with Lacan’s

rhetoric affords Lacanian psychoanalysis a status as a special kind of science by

understanding of the work of rhetoric. More accurately,

providing it with a set of techniques for paying attention to the mathematical qualities of discourse.
Regardless of how one understands the moniker “science,” rhetoric drives psychoanalysis toward a
systematic account of the possible modes of connection that animate actually existing discourses, and
toward an observation of the concrete functions of trope in the social life of the subject. Lacan derives
this understanding of psychoanalysis as the systematic science of attending to discourse from Freud. For
example, in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud argues for a practice of reading dreams that revised received methods for interpreting dreams. Prior to Freud’s intervention there was a long-standing tradition that held that an
image in a dream correlated with an unconscious meaning in much the same way that a word in a dictionary correlates with a definition. In order to found his mode of dream interpretation, Freud dissents from a definitional
understanding of dreams by distinguishing between manifest “dream content” and the underlying logic of a dream, or the “dream-thought.”64 Although the manifest content of a dream may seem utterly random, it is driven by
the dream-thought expressed in it, investing the specific contents of the dream with a meaning dependent on the thought that articulates it. For Freud there is no universal protocol for the expression and interpretation of dream
contents, but rather a set of associations unique to an individual which, although not uniform in content, are bound by a more universal logic of expression. It is tempting to see in Freud’s presentation of the interpretation of
dreams a cognitive semiotics that verges on a proto-presentation of Saussure’s conception of differential signification, albeit sixteen years prior to the publication of the Course in General Linguistics. Each element in a dream means
something not because it has an intrinsic referent, but rather because it is defined by a relationship of difference to other elements in the dream content, and cumulatively the structure of differentially related signs allows for an
interpretation of the underlying dream-thought. Naturally, this is the reading of Lacan’s employment of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams by those who see Lacanian psychoanalysis as an integration of Freud’s unconscious and the
insights of Saussure.65 The difficulty arises when one tries to determine what exactly Lacan is attempting to do by reading the regularities of structure that animate dreams and, by extension, discourse. On one account, this reading

a second account replaces the structuralist poetic

produces a logic of dreams and discourse that emphasizes structure at the expense of the empirical. But

account with a rhetorical conception of trope, inventing a science of rhetoric that forces attention to the
interchange between form and its empirical manifestations. To instantiate a rhetorical relation between
the logics and manifestation of dream contents, Lacan turns to a science of oratory that drives analytic
labor toward the empirical life of discourses .66 “What specifies a science,” writes Lacan,” “is having an
object.”67 To say that a science must have an object elicits an objection that specifying an “object”
presumes a science engages something given in advance as opposed to contingently made. But approaching an object
requires equal parts analytic rigor and prudence: “we must be very prudent, because this object changes . . . as the science develops. . . . [W]e cannot say that the object of modern physics is the same now as at its birth.”68

A science is not a general theory to

Attention to a changing object implies a relationship of mutual determination between the mode of inquiry and the objects that such a mode takes up.

be mapped onto reality because sciences are parasitic on the specific. As Lacan argues, science always begins with the particular: “To be sure,
analysis as a science is always a science of the particular. The coming to fruition of an analysis is always a unique case, even if the unique cases lend themselves ... to some generality. . . . [A]nalysis is an experience of the

But what is the particular object around which a science of oratory might emerge? The answer is
particular.”69

the economy of trope and enjoyment. Claiming that Freud drew attention to a “fundamental” opposition between metaphor and metonymy in “mechanisms of dreams,” Lacan argues
that “what Freud calls condensation is what in rhetoric one calls metaphor, what one calls displacement is metonymy.”70 That this reference to a rhetoric of trope frames Lacan’s application of the vocabulary of structural
linguistics is clear from the concluding sentence of this paragraph: “It’s for this reason that in focusing attention back onto the signifier we are doing nothing other than returning to the starting point of the Freudian discovery.”71 In
“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan argues that the core insight of The Interpretation of Dreams might be fruitfully applied to more than just unpacking dreams. The logic that inheres in dream
work is the same logic that underwrites the function of speech generally. If, following Lacan’s reading of Interpretation of Dreams, one is inclined to agree that speech serves as a synecdoche for rhetorical processes generally; by
extension one might conclude that speech offers privileged insight into the functioning of everyday discourses. Thus it is no surprise that Lacan recommends instruction in rhetoric as an indispensable component of analytic
practice. According to Lacan, this realization should compel attention to the function of “rhetoric . . . ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition—these are the syntactical displacements;
metaphor, catachresis, antonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche— these are the semantic condensations in which Freud teaches us to read the intentions . . . out of which the subject modulates his oneiric discourse.”72
This extension of Freud’s dream work to speech by means of a globalization of trope founds the possibility of psychoanalysis as a science, via recourse to the scientific properties of oratory: At the bottom of the Freudian
mechanism one rediscovers these old figures of rhetoric which over time have come to lose their sense for us but which for centuries elicited a prodigious degree of interest. Rhetoric, or the art of oration, was a science and not just
an art. We now wonder, as if at an enigma, why these exercises could have captivated whole groups of men for such a long time. If this is an anomaly it’s analogous to the existence of psychoanalysis, and it’s perhaps the same
anomaly that’s involved in man’s relationships to language, returning over the course of history, recurrently, with different ramifications and now presenting itself to us from a scientific angle in Freud’s discovery.73 Why wonder at
the “enigma” of a science of oratory and the “exercises” that constituted it? The “exercises” that Lacan is most likely referring to were the progymnasmata—the graduated sequence of somewhat formulaic pedagogical practices
that introduced the student of oratory to the inventional moves one might make in composing and/or delivering a speech. This attention to form, embodied in both a theory of arrangement and delivery, attuned the budding orator
to the regularities in speech that render inventional moves not only intelligible, but potentially eloquent. Oratorical practice had foreseen and, long in advance of contemporary linguistics, “discovered” the formal properties
animating discursive practice. There are two senses of the word “formal” for Lacan: one that relies on quantification and another that relies, if not on math as we typically understand it, then on the mathematizable, or that which

can be symbolically rendered as a repeatable relation. 74 A science is defined by mathematization, as opposed to quantification:
“what is distinctive about positive science, modern science, isn’t quantification but mathematization and
specifically combinatory, that is to say linguistic, mathematization which includes series and
iteration.”75 The oratorical tradition discovered that rhetorical invention was scientific: in discovering
the progymnasmata, the tradition articulated a conception of inventio (invention) as the discovery of
repeatable symbolic forms. Lacan prefers the first sense of “formal” because it comports with oratorical pedagogy’s insight that language is mathematizable (amenable to a description of its
repeatable formal properties), which is the condition of possibility for a science of oratory. The science of oratory discovers a mode of knowing that would

eventually make “linguistics the most advanced of the human sciences” by specifying that which is
formally repeatable in the life of the subject and its discourses.76 This understanding of rhetoric moves
it from a prudential “art” of the intuitive intersubjective judgments to the symbolic science of forms. For
Lacan, an art premised on the disciplining of critical intuition does not move beyond the Imaginary because “everything intuitive is far closer to the Imaginary than the Symbolic.”77 In place of the art of intersubjectively grounded
intuition, Lacan calls for attention to the trans-subjective apparatus of the Symbolic: “the important thing here is to realize that the chain of possible combinations of the encounter can be studied as such, as an order which subsists

This
in rigor, independently of all subjectivity. . . . [T]he symbol is embodied in an apparatus—with which it is not to be confused, the apparatus being just its support. And it is embodied in a literally trans-subjective way.”78

understanding of rhetoric as science does not abandon the subject; rather, it decenters the subject as a
taken-for-granted interpretive maxim, replacing attention to what goes on between subjects with the
formal movement of tropes, a movement that is mathematizable, and therefore amenable to a formal
scientific account of its effects: In as much as he is [they are] committed to a play of [the Symbolic], to a
symbolic world . . . man [human] is a decentered subject. Well, it is with this same play, this same world, that the machine is built. The most complicated machines
are made only with words. Speech is first and foremost that object of exchange whereby we are reorganized. . . . That is how the circulation of speech begins, and it swells to the point of the symbol which makes algebraic

The world of the symbolic is machinic

calculations possible. The machine is the structure detached from the activity of the subject. The symbolic world is the world of the machine.79

in a very specific way: only insofar as it relies on the set of regularized, logically possible connections
between words and other words. In other words, the Symbolic is machinic because it is tropologically
constituted. But because the Symbolic is tropologically constituted, its machinic nature is premised on
the various failures in unicity that invite the trope as a compensatory function. Thus, if the Symbolic is a
machine, it is a machine that fails. In the next chapter, I take up the paradox of the failing machine by suggesting the metaphor of economy as a way of parsing the relationship between the
machinic (or automatic) and its failure in the life of the Symbolic.
Even if Freud was wrong, psychoanalysis has evolved.
Westen ‘98 (Drew, Department of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School, “The Scientific Legacy of
Sigmund Freud Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science,” Psychological Bulletin
November 1998 Vol. 124, No. 3, 333-371s)

Although commentators periodically declare that Freud is dead, his repeated burials lie on shaky
grounds. Critics typically attack an archaic version of psychodynamic theory that most clinicians
similarly consider obsolete. Central to contemporary psychodynamic theory is a series of propositions
about (a) unconscious cognitive, affective, and motivational processes; (b) ambivalence and the
tendency for affective and motivational dynamics to operate in parallel and produce compromise
solutions; (c) the origins of many personality and social dispositions in childhood; (d) mental
representations of the self, others, and relationships; and (e) developmental dynamics. An enormous
body of research in cognitive, social, developmental, and personality psychology now supports many
of these propositions. Freud's scientific legacy has implications for a wide range of domains in
psychology, such as integration of affective and motivational constraints into connectionist models in
cognitive science. Freud, like Elvis, has been dead for a number of years but continues to be cited
with some regularity. Although the majority of clinicians report that they rely to some degree upon
psychodynamic 1 principles in their work ( Pope, Tabachnick, & Keith-Spiegel, 1987 ), most
researchers consider psychodynamic ideas to be at worst absurd and obsolete and at best irrelevant
or of little scientific interest. In the lead article of a recent edition of Psychological Science, Crews
(1996) arrived at a conclusion shared by many: "[T]here is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or
therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas" (p.
63). Despite the explosion of empirical studies of unconscious cognitive processes (see, e.g.,
Greenwald, 1992 ; Kihlstrom, 1987 ; Schacter, 1992 ), few reference Freud; none cite any
contemporary psychodynamic work; and in general, psychodynamic concepts are decreasingly
represented in the major psychology journals ( Robins & Craik, 1994 ). The situation is similar in the
popular media and in broader intellectual discourse. Publications ranging from Time to the New York
Review of Books periodically publish Freud's intellectual obituary, with critics charging that Freud's
ideas–such as his dual-instinct theory or his hypotheses about female personality development–are
seriously out of date and without scientific merit (e.g., Crews, 1993 ). Many aspects of Freudian
theory are indeed out of date, and they should be: Freud died in 1939, and he has been slow to
undertake further revisions. His critics, however, are equally behind the times, attacking Freudian
views of the 1920s as if they continue to have some currency in their original form. Psychodynamic
theory and therapy have evolved considerably since 1939 when Freud's bearded countenance was
last sighted in earnest. Contemporary psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists no longer write
much about ids and egos, nor do they conceive of treatment for psychological disorders as an
archaeological expedition in search of lost memories ( Aron, 1996 ; Gabbard, 1994 ; Horowitz, 1988 ;
Kolb, Cooper, & Fishman, 1995 ; Mitchell, 1988 ; Wachtel, 1993 ). People do sometimes describe
feelings or behaviors in therapy that conform remarkably to aspects of Freud's psychosexual theories
(such as a patient of mine with erectile problems whose associations to a sexual encounter led to an
image of having sex with his mother, followed by some unpleasant anal imagery). Nevertheless,
psychotherapists who rely on theories derived from Freud do not typically spend their time lying in
wait for phallic symbols. They pay attention to sexuality, because it is an important part of human life
and intimate relationships and one that is often filled with conflict. Today, however, most
psychodynamic theorists and therapists spend much of their time helping people with problematic
interpersonal patterns, such as difficulty getting emotionally intimate or repeatedly getting intimate
with the wrong kind of person (see Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983 ).
 Misc tourney
Bataille’s conception of ritual expenditure are an attempt to rebel against an authority
figure which has long since disappeared
Foley 12 [MATT FOLEY, NEIL MCROBERT AND ASPASIA STEPHANOU “THE LIMITS OF TRANSGRESSION
AND THE SUBJECT”]
That is not to say, however, that Kristeva’s understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque is one of lawlessness: “In fact, this
‘transgression’of linguistic, logical and social codes within the carnivalesque only exists and succeeds , of
course, because it accepts another law” (41). As Bataille notes, if transgression is to be lawless it becomes
an unequivocal act of violence: Often the transgression of a taboo is no less subject to rules than acts that
are law abiding. No liberty here. “At such and such a time and up to a certain point this is permissible”—that is what the transgression
concedes. But once a limited licence has been allowed, unlimited urges towards violence may break forth (2006, 65). In turn, a
transgression adheres to its own esoteric law , whether it is de Sade’s pursuit of pleasure, Bataille’s laws of
appropriation and excretion, or the injunction to throw off and usurp societal power relationships by
revelling in the carnivalesque. When a transgression is no longer bound by law, it becomes limitless,
pushing towards an anarchy of unmediated violence . Indeed, this articulation of the possibility of a
violence that becomes limitless distinguishes Bataille ’s thought from Michel Foucault’s . Foucault, although
clearly indebted to Bataille, posits that the relationship between transgression and law takes the form of a spiral
which no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightening in the night which, from the beginning
of time, gives a black and dense intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to
the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity; the
flash loses itself in this space it marks
with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity ([1963] 1999, p.61). Naturally
there is a danger here of hypostatizing transgression through evocative language and imagery; Foucault’s
turns of phrase “flash of lightening” and “black, intense density of the night” giving a rhetorical power to theory that encourages a confusion
between, on the one hand, the pull and connotation of rhetorical imagery speaking of transgression, and, on the other, the reality of a single
transgression that may be witnessed a posteriori. This is an inherent issue that inflects any conceptualising of
transgression, to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, within the limits of the prison house of language . It is the variety
of connotations inherent to transgression that still limits us today in talking about it in any unified,
closed, or purely denotative way. Within postmodern culture, the conditions that make transgression possible
have changed. Critics have argued that the decline of paternal symbolic authority in contemporary society has
altered the meaning of transgression and has transformed it into an act that has more in common with
the norm. When prohibiting limits are no longer stable but fragile, transgressive acts become ultimately redundant
within a society that recognizes no rules. Reading and appropriating the work of Lacan, Slavoj Žižek writes that, For Lacan,
the Kantian overcoming of the “dialectic” of Law and desire — as well as the concomitant “obliteration
of the space for inherent transgression”—is a point of no return in the history of ethics: there is no way of
undoing this revolution, and returning to good old times of prohibitions whose transgression sustained us. This is why today’s desperate
neo-conservative attempts to reassert “old values” are ultimately a failed perverse strategy of imposing
prohibitions which can no longer be taken seriously . . . Prohibition against which we can assert our freedom is no longer
viable, our freedom is asserted as autonomous, every limitation/constraint is completely self-posited (2006, 93-4). That is why for Žižek,
Bataille is “strictly premodern” because he insists on the dialectic of the Law and its transgression; the
necessity to create limits in order to violate them (95). For Žižek it is the Law that transgresses the stability of
our pleasure “as the shattering force of the absolute destabilizing ‘heterogeneity’” (ibid.). With no proper limits,
the freedom to transgress comes with the obligation to enjoy. Thus, the difficulty for today’s civilised subject is to set their own limitations (90).
The “law itself,” Žižek writes, “is the highest transgression” (2003, 53) as enjoyment, which we experience as
transgression, is never a free choice but always imposed on the subject (1991, 9). Thus the law becomes the
only true transgression which changes “all the ordinary criminal transgressions into an indolent
positivity” (30). The Law is then what commands jouissance. Žižek explains that in postmodernity there is a turn
from the figure of paternal authority to the one of the obscene primordial Father-Jouisseur, the
uncompromising God who “does not have to account for anything He does” (1999, 318). The Law is split
between symbolic law and its superego supplement that demands the subject to enjoy . However, the latter’s
demand for enjoyment and the freedom to enjoy become a responsibility where the command to enjoy in the end bars access to enjoyment.
The subject’s superego, no longer able to identify with a symbolic authority that defines a limit and punishes transgressions, is urged to
transgress. However, without a Symbolic Father transgression is joyless. Once
everything is permitted desire is placed into
crisis. The lack of a proper symbolic prohibition imprisons the subject in a repetitive cycle of ineffectual
transgressions.

To exist as a speaking subject within debate entails entry into the complex
consensuses over meaning, norms, practices, and traditions as well as taboos which
are constitutive of the register of the Symbolic. The elusive nature of the signifier
forces subjects to confront a vague, overwhelming sense of loss which instills an
unattainable chain of desire. This absence defines subjectivity and cannot be
overcome by any individual—setting the foundation of the fruitless project of trying
to satisfy the lack.
McGowan 2016. Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont,
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, Columbia University Press, 2016. Pg. 28-32
When he writes Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, Freud begins to define the subject through its constitutive loss. From this point on in his thinking, he
conceives of the subject as completely determined by loss, as driven toward its own destruction —a
process that he misleadingly labels "death drive.” Though there are hints of this breakthrough in earlier works, the radicality of the 1920
revolution should not be understated. In fact, even Freud himself did not fully grasp its radicality, as evidenced by his failed attempt to reduce the subject's repetition
of failure and loss to a tendency to return to an inorganic state. Death
drive connotes a desire to die, which is why it leads readers
of Freud (and even Freud himself) astray. What he is really onto with this concept is that the subject finds
satisfaction in repeating loss, that the subject's satisfaction is inextricable from failure. No one sets out
consciously to fail, and, even if one did, the act of making failure a goal would immediately transform it
into a different form of success. Within consciousness the subject cannot give failure primacy.
Consciousness is oriented around projects in which the subject aims at succeeding, and the failures
of these projects, from the perspective of consciousness, are only contingent failures the subject can
attempt to remedy by trying again or trying harder. Unconsciously, however, the subject depends on
failure to satisfy itself. Failure and loss produce the object as absent, and it is only the absence of
the object that renders it satisfying. Absence animates the subject, driving it to act, in a way that
presence cannot. If we think about who marches in the street, it is those who lack, not those who have, and when those who have do march, it is because
the threat of loss manifests itself. Even though they march for the elimination of this lack, it is absence that motivates them to march in the first place. It is also
absence or the threat of it that enables us to get out of bed in the morning and go to work. The subject that had no absence in its existence would be unable to act and
would lack the impetus even to kill itself. After seeing numerous patients display their attachment to absence and loss, Freud concludes that it holds the key to the
subject's form of satisfaction. We can see this play out in sports fandom. Though we consciously root for our favorite team to win, we find more unconscious
satisfaction in the persistent struggles of the sports team that we root for than in its unqualified successes. The close game is infinitely more interesting than the
blowout because it enables the fan to experience loss while not having loss enter into consciousness. No one wants to root for a team that wins all its games, and if
fans flock to the games of teams that win all the time, they go to see the loss (or potential loss) that will disrupt the winning, just like auto racing fans go to see cars
crashing (or potentially crashing), though this desire remains unconscious. Even when our favorite team wins a championship, we begin almost immediately to
consider how they might fare the next year. This
is a way of leaving the terrain of success for that of potential failure.
When we achieve the pinnacle of success, we seek out a way to return loss into our existence by
imagining a new challenge or embarking on a new project. Loss injects value into the subject's
existence and gives it an object that provides satisfaction. Freud's conception of the priority of loss and
its repetition troubles other psychoanalysts (like Fairbairn, for instance) because it highlights the impossibility of any satisfaction
associated with obtaining the object. After this point, for Freud, one simply cannot have the satisfying object. Any notion of success
becomes unthinkable, and one must reconceive satisfaction in terms of how one fails. Failure
becomes the only option. On the basis of privileging failure, Freud reimagines the object in a way that
challenges both much of the history of philosophy and the psychic demands of capitalism. The object is
not an object that the subject hopes to obtain but a limit that the subject encounters. The subject cannot
overcome the limit but constitutes itself and its satisfaction through the limit. That is to say, the object
that thwarts the subject's efforts at obtaining it retroactively creates the subject around the recalcitrance.
The subject seeks out what it cannot obtain and latches itself onto these objects. Its failure with regard to them provides a satisfaction that completely defies the
capitalist image of reality. Freud's conception of the object enables us to rethink the famous slogan from May 1968 in France. The mantra of this movement— jouir
sans entraves (enjoy without hindrances)—expresses the critique of capitalism’s repressiveness, the critique that
dominated much of the twentieth century. The problem with this slogan is that eliminating the barriers to enjoyment would
eliminate the source of enjoyment. By slightly changing it to jouir les entraves (enjoy the hindrances), we
capture the constitutive importance of the obstacle. Satisfaction exists in the obstacle that the object erects
in the face of the subject's efforts to obtain it rather than in the eradication of all obstacles. But this is
what the capitalist imperative to accumulate enables us to avoid confronting. The speaking subject
satisfies itself through its process of failing to obtain its object, even if this goes unrecognized by the
subject itself. The relationship between subjectivity and loss leads the subject to flee this recognition
and find asylum in the framework of capitalist accumulation. The subject repeats a constitutive loss
because loss is the only way that the speaking subject has to relate to objects , even though capitalism
provides the image of an alternative. The signifier confronts the subject with an absence that forms
subjectivity and that the subject can never overcome. But the loss that haunts the subject also
constitutes the subject, which is why it seeks to repeat this loss. The signifier creates the subject
through the act of removing what is most essential for the subject, even though this essential object
doesn't exist prior to its removal. From this point on, the subject will remain unable to divorce satisfaction
from loss. One might say that through the signifier the subject loses the object into existence. Loss generates the object at the same time that it marks its
disappearance, which has a determinative effect on how the subject satisfies itself. The subject may find fleeting pleasure in success and
achievement, but its only satisfaction will take the form of the repetition of loss. Subjects undermine
themselves and self-sabotage not because they are stubborn or stupid but because this is their path to
satisfaction. For the speaking subject, winning is only a detour on the way to losing. Even the winners in
the world of the signifier are ultimately on the side of defeat, but just take a longer time to get there than
others. When we understand the difference between instinctual beings and speaking subjects, the appeal of thinking about ourselves in terms of instinct rather than
subjectivity becomes self-evident. Instinctual beings have the capacity to overcome loss and obtain satisfaction through the object they seek. Instinctual beings can
become winners that suffer only contingent failures rather than remaining ensconced in perpetual failure. Instinct holds within it the promise of a satisfaction untainted
by loss, a full satiation that, even if it soon disappears, can often be replicated. The being envisions a goal that would provide satisfaction and then either attains the
goal or not. Success may be difficult and may not endure, but it's not impossible. But the subject attains satisfaction through the repetition of its inability to obtain its
object. Failure
is the subject's mode of success. Lacan describes this in one of his most lucid explanations
of the structure of subjectivity. In Seminar XI, he separates the subject's goal from its aim and uses a metaphor
to explain the aim. He claims, "When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what he
brings back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the way taken.” The satisfaction of the
subject derives from the path that it takes. But what Lacan fails to add here is that this path necessarily
involves an encounter with loss: rather than seeking out its object, the subject finds ways to miss it and
to ensure that it remains lost. The lost object is constitutively lost, and the satisfaction that it offers
depends on it remaining so. The subject has no hope that it might attain its lost object, which is why psychoanalysis must refrain from describing the
infant's satisfying relationship with the mother's breast prohibited by the father. It is only in retrospect (or from the perspective of an observer) that this relationship
appears perfectly satisfying. Freud
first conceives of the appeal of loss in response to his observation of self-
destructive actions that appear to violate the pleasure principle. It is the penchant for self-sabotage and
self-destruction that leads Freud to speculate about the existence of a death drive that aims at a return to
an inorganic state. But we don't have to indulge in this type of hypothesis if we recognize the constitutive
role that loss plays in the subject's satisfaction. Without the lost object, the subject would lose what
animates it and the source of its enjoyment. The act of self-sabotage, even though it detracts from the
subject's pleasure, enables the subject to continue to satisfy itself. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud theorizes that the
negative therapeutic reaction that subverts the psychoanalytic cure is not just the product of resistances. The subject does not want to be cured because it associates
healing with the loss of its foundational loss, a prospect much more horrifying that the pain of the neurosis. With the recognition of the constitutive role of loss in the
psychic economy, psychoanalysis must alter its conception of the cure. Rather than simply ending repression or even overcoming loss, the cure has to involve
changing the subject's relation to its lost object, experiencing the intimate connection between loss and satisfaction.

Debate is structured by agential fantasy: an impotent political demand on the State

answered and alleviated by judges to restart the cycle next round. This ensures
demands for governmental action become the fixated on the drive, which precludes
a holistic analysis of actual desire and fantasy. Their model of politics is a hysteric
demanding a new master. This desire disenfranchises political dissent. Telling the
affirmative “NO” and refusing the demand opens up a new mode of political
subjectivity that names its own desire
Lundberg 2012 (Christian, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC, Chapel Hill, “On Being Bound to
Equivalential Chains”, Cultural Studies 26.2-3)
Laclau's On Populist Reason provides an elegant account of demand as the fundamental unit of the political, and by extension of politics as a field
of antagonism. Laclau's basic goal is to define the specificity of populist reason, or, to give an account of populism as ‘special emphasis on a
political logic which, is a necessary ingredient of politics tout court’, of ‘Populism, quite simply, as a way of constructing the political’ (Laclau
2005, p. 18). Here, a focus on demands replaces
a now prevalent approach focused on various taxonomies of
populism (which Laclau diagnoses as hopelessly unsystematic) with a more formal account of the political based on the
logic of demands, which in turn provides a way of thinking about the political as the space of demand and
politics as a practice of working through specific demands. Demands serve a number of functions that derive from the split
between the universal and the particular that Laclau relies upon. Demands articulate a specific political claim at the level of the particular, and
also imply a more generalized relationship to hegemony in the register of the universal. On this logic, demands
represent the
hegemonic order, creating an implicit picture of how it functions and might change. Simultaneously, demands
create possible lines of equivalential affinity between others also making demands on the hegemonic order.
Thus, the demand is more fundamental than the group, in that the operation of the split demand inaugurates all ‘the various forms of articulation
between a logic of difference and a logic of equivalence’ that animate the social affinities that give groups their coherence (Laclau 2005, p. 20).
The logic of the demand is in turn the logic of equivalence, and equivalence is as important for how it animates a group identity, as it is in
positing claims on a hegemonic order. Although Laclau owes a significant debt to Freud and Lacan, it is not clear that his theory of demand is
explicitly crafted from psychoanalytic categories. For example, how central is enjoyment to Laclau's relatively formal account of the demand? As
Glynos and Stavrakakis have argued, there
is a ‘complete and conspicuous absence in Laclau's work of Lacanian
categories such as fantasy, and, perhaps more importantly, jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p. 202). Glynos and
Stavrakakis claim that there is ‘to [their] knowledge no reference in Laclau's work to the concept of jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p.
209). On Populist Reason contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance as worked out by Copjec, which Laclau summarizes by saying:
there is no achievable jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an analogous one) is
made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and hegemony is nothing more than the
investment in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us. The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar,
they are simply identical. (Laclau 2005, p. 109) There is an elegance to Laclau's point about enjoyment, provided that enjoyment is reducible to a
set of logical forms. This presupposition makes the lack of talk about jouissance in Laclau's work understandable. If jouissance and hegemony are
identical, one does not need Lacan to say something that might be said more elegantly with Gramsci. Jouissance is simply hegemonic investment,
an elevation of an object or identity to the level of a thing or a universal. Despite occasional caveats to the contrary, the
greatest virtues of
Laclau's version of the political stem from his relentlessly persistent application of a formal , almost structural
account of the political. And, as is the case with many well executed structuralist accounts, Laclau's system can elegantly
incorporate caveats, objections to and oversights in the original system by incorporating them into the
functioning of the structure – jouissance can easily be read as nothing more than hegemony in this account without changing the
original coordinates of the system too drastically. Yet, enjoyment provides one particularly difficult stumbling block for a dedicated formal
account. To start with, enjoyment is never quite as ‘achievable’ as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far
from being the
consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement to a failing in a structure :
for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless enjoyment of one's own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a subject in
either finding a grounding or consummating an authoritative account of its coherence. This ‘uselessness’ defines the operation of jouissance.
Thus, for example, when Lacan suggests that ‘language is not the speaking subject’ in the Seminar on Feminine
Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance
is understood as something
excessive that is born of the failure of structures of signification (Lacan 1977). Language is not the speaking subject
precisely because what is passed through the grist mill of the speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is prefigured by logics of
structure, meaning and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment
is recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization is precisely the moment where it stops
being jouissance. Following Glynos and Stavrakakis's suggestion, one might press the question of the relationship between the demand and
jouissance as a way of highlighting the differences that a purely Lacanian reading of demand might make for Laclau's understanding of politics.
Framing enjoyment as equivalent with hegemony, Laclau identifies the fundamental ‘split’ in
psychoanalytic theory between the universal and the particular demands of a group. Framing the split in
this way, and as the privileged site of the political, Laclau occludes attention to another split: namely, the
split within a subject, between the one who enters an equivalential relationship and the identitarian claim
that sutures this subject into a set of linkages. This too is a site of enjoyment, where a subject identifies with an
external image of itself for the sake of providing its practices of subjectivity with a kind of enjoyable retroactive coherence. The demand is
relevant here, but not simply because it represents and anticipates a change in the social order or because it identifies a point of commonality.
Here the demand is also a demand to be recognized as a subject among other subjects , and given the
sanction and love of the symbolic order. The implication of this argument about the nature of enjoyment is that the
perverse dialectic of misfirings, failure and surpluses in identity reveals something politically dangerous
in not moving beyond demand. Put another way: not all equivalences are equally equivalent. Some
equivalences become fetishes, becoming points of identification that eclipse the ostensible political goal of the
demand. To extend the line of questioning to its logical conclusion, can we be bound to our equivalential chains? Freud, Lacan and the
demand Demand plays a central role in Freud's tripartite scheme for the human psyche specifically in the formation of the ego. Although this
scheme does not exercise the same hold over psychoanalytic thinking that it once did, the question of the ego still functions as an important point
of departure for psychoanalytic thinking as a representative case of the production of the subject and identity. Even for critics of ‘ego
psychology’, the idea of the ego as a representation of the ‘I’ of the human subject is still significant – the main question is what kind of
analytical dispositions one takes towards the ego, the contingencies of its emergence and its continuing function. Despite the tendency of some
commentators to naturalize Freud's tripartite schema of the human psyche, Freud's account of the ego does not characterize the ego as pre-existent
or automatically given. Although present in virtually every human subject, the ego is not inevitably present: the ego is a compensatory formation
that arises in the usual course of human development as a subject negotiates the articulation and refusal of its needs as filtered through demand.
Hypothetically a ‘subject’ whose every need is fulfilled by another is never quite a subject: this entity would never find occasion to differentiate
itself from the other who fulfils its every need. As a mode of individuation and subjectification, egos are economies of frustration and
compensation. This economy relies on a split in the Freudian demand, which is both a demand to satiate a specific need and a demand for
addressee to provide automatic fulfilment of need generally. The
generative power of the demand relies on this split and
on fact that some demands will be refused. This economy of need and frustration works because refusal of a specific need
articulated as a demand on another is also a refusal of the idea that the addressee of the demand can fulfil all the subject's needs, requiring a set of
individuation compensatory economic functions to negotiate the refusal of specific demands. ‘Ego’ is nothing more than the name
for the contingent economy of compensatory subjectification driven by the repetition and refusal of
demands – the nascent subject presents wants and needs in the form of the demand, but the role of the demand is not the simple fulfilment of
these wants and needs. The demand and its refusal are the fulcrum on which the identity and insularity of the
subject are produced: an unformed amalgam of needs and articulated demands is transformed into a subject that negotiates the
vicissitudes of life with others. Put in the metaphor of developmental psychology, an infant lodges the instinctual demands of the id on others but
these demands cannot be, and for the sake of development, must not be fulfilled. Thus the logic of the pop-psychology observation that the
incessant demands of children for impermissible objects (‘may I have a fourth helping of dessert’) or meanings that culminate in ungroundable
authoritative pronouncements (the game of asking a never-ending ‘whys’) are less about satisfaction of a request than the identity producing
effects of the distanciating parental ‘no’. In ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, Freud argues: If … demands meet with no satisfaction, intolerable
conditions arise … At that point … the ego begins to function. If all the driving force that sets the vehicle in motion is derived from the id, the
ego … undertakes the steering, without which no goal can be reached. The instincts in the id press for immediate satisfaction at all costs, and in
that way they achieve nothing or even bring about appreciable damage. It is the task of the ego to guard against such mishaps, to mediate between
the claims of the id and the objections of the external world. (Freud 1986, p. 22) Later works move this theory from the narrow bounds of the
parent/child relationship to a broader social relationship which was continually constituting and shaping the function of the ego – this is a theme
of works such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, as well as Civilization and its Discontents. The latter repeats the same general
dynamics of ego formation as ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, but moves the question beyond individual development towards the entirety of
social relations. For Freud, the inevitability of conflicts between an individual and the social whole is simply one of the facts of life among other
people. Life with others inevitably produces blockages in the individual's attempts to fulfil certain desires – some demands for the fulfilment of
desires must be frustrated. This blockage produces feelings of guilt, which in turn are sublimated as a general social morality. Here frustration of
demand is both productive in that it authorizes social moral codes, and civilization as mode of functioning, though it does so at the cost of
imposing a constitutively contested relationship with social mores (Freud 1989). Though there are many places to begin thinking the Freudian
demand in Lacan, one of the best places to start is an almost accidental Lacanian rumination on demands. Confronted by student calls
to join the movement of 1968 Lacan famously quipped: ‘as hysterics you demand a new master: you will
get it!’ Framing the meaning of his response requires a treatment of Lacan's theory of the demand and its
relationship to hysteria as an enabling and constraining political subject position. Lacan's theory of the demand
picks up at Freud's movement outward from the paradigmatic relationships between the parent/child and individual/civilization towards a more
general account of the subjects, sociality and signification. The infrastructure supporting this theoretical movement transposes Freud's
comparatively natural and genetic account of development to a set of metaphors for dealing with the subject's entry into signification. Lacan's
goal is to rearticulate Freudian development processes as metaphors for a theory of the subject's production within signification. In Lacanian
terms, what is at stake in this transposition is a less naturalized account of the subject by privileging supplementary practices of enjoyment that
give a subject coherence as an agent, not in the sense of an ultimate ontological grounding, but rather as a mode of enjoying the repetition of
retroactive totalities that name and produce subjects. This process is most famously worked out in Lacan's famous ‘Mirror Stage’ which details
the trauma of the subject's insertion into the symbolic order, and the way that this constitutive dislocation generates the jouissance that sustains
the production of subjectivity (Lacan 1982a). Looking in the mirror, Lacan's hypothetical infant does not yet have a concept of a unified self,
puzzled by the fact that when it moves the image of the child in the mirror also moves. From the child in the mirror, Lacan infers the existence of
two ‘I's underwriting processes of subjectivization: an ‘ideal I’, a statuesque projection of what it means to be an ‘I’ (in this case the image of the
child) and a phenomenological experience of ‘I-ness’. Lacan treats the dialectic of misidentification in the mirror as a constant and constitutive
performance of subjectivity as opposed to a specific developmental stage (Wilden 1982). In this interpretation, the child in the mirror stage is a
metaphor for the constant production of the subject as a performance of the self in relation to a constitutive gap between the Symbolic and the
subject, and the articulation of subjectivity as a category serves to repress the trauma produced in the margin between a nascent subject, its
alienation from a projected external identity, and within the structure of signification. The paradoxical effect of this mode of subject formation is
that not only does the child ‘discover’ that she is the child in the mirror, it also experiences a disorienting distance between itself and its image.
Despite this fact, the child requires the an external image such as the one in the mirror to impose a kind of unity on its experience – the image of
the other child provides an imaginary framing, a retroactive totality or a kind of narrative about what it means to be a self. The paradox of
subjectivity lies in the simultaneity of identifying with an image of one's self that is given by a specific location within the symbolic order and the
simultaneous alienation produced by the image's externality. Thus, the assumption of a frame for identity cannot ever completely effective, or, a
subject is never completely comfortable inhabiting subjectivity – there is always an impossible gap between an experience of alienated
subjectivity, a prefigured given image of one's subjectivity and the experience of being produced by the Symbolic. There is a famous Lacanian
aphorism that holds that ‘the signifier represents a subject for another signifier’ (Lacan 1977, p. 142). This formulation of
the subject's relation to language inverts the conventional wisdom that ontologically pre-given subjects use
language as an instrument to communicate their subjective intentions. Signifiers are constituted by their
difference, and subjects come into being in negotiating their entry into this realm of difference. Instead of
articulating subjective states through language, subjects are articulated through language , within the differential space of
signification. The paradoxical implication of this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its unavoidable
insertion into the space of the Symbolic. The mirror stage marks the excess of the demand as a mode of subject formation. Subjects assume the
identity as subjects as a way of accommodating to the demand placed on them by the symbolic, and as a node for producing demands on the
symbolic, or, of being recognized as a subject (Lacan 1982a, p. 4). Here jouissance is nothing more than the useless enjoyment of one's own
subjectivity, surplus produced in negotiating a difficult gap between the phenomenological and ideal ‘I's, produced by a failure in relation
between Lacan's phenomenological I and the Symbolic. Both the site of subject production and the site where this subject fills out an identity by
investing in equivalential linkages and common demands are sites of enjoyment. In this sense, perhaps there is an excess of jouissance that
remains even after the reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but
ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the self that produces the conditions of possibility for investment, the defining point for Laclau's
reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This specific site of excess, where the subject negotiates the terms on a non-relationship with the symbolic
is the primary site splitting need, demand and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a precursor to demand.
Demand is the filtering of the need through signification, but as Sheridan notes ‘there is no adequation between need and demand’ (Sheridan
1982). The same type of split that inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, though in this case the split does not derive
from the empirical impossibility of fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of ever fully articulating needs to or receiving a
satisfactory response from the Other. Since there is no adequation, the specificity of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that
demand presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfil the demand. This impossibility points to the paradoxical nature of demand: namely that
the demand is less a way of addressing need than a call for love and recognition by this other. ‘In this way’,
writes Lacan, ‘demand annuls (aufheht) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very
satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced (sich erniedrigt) to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love’ (Lacan
1982b, p. 286). The difficulty is that the Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the
mirror stage is the constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the symbolic – the mirror stage marks the constitutive split between the
subject and the Symbolic. This paradoxical split, namely the structural impossibility of fulfilling demands, resonates with the logic of the
Freudian demand in that the frustration of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that ‘desire is neither the appetite for
satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second’ (Lacan 1982b, p. 287). How
might this subtraction occur? The answer to this question requires an account of the Other as seemingly omnipotent, and as simultaneously unable
to fulfil demands. This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift which it does not have,
namely the gift of love: It will seem odd, no doubt, that in opening up the immeasurable space that all demand implies, namely, that of being a
request for love …. Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is
opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other … having no universal satisfaction … It is this whim
that introduces the phantom of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is installed. (Lacan 1982c, p. 311)
Transposed to the realm of political demands, this framing of demand reverses the classically liberal
presupposition regarding demand and agency. In the classical iteration and contemporary critical theories that inherit
its spirit, there is a presupposition that a demand is a way of exerting agency, and that the more firmly that
the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The Lacanian framing of the demand
sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the more firmly one lodges a demand the more desperately
one clings to the legitimate ability of an institution to fulfil it. Thus, demands ought to reach a kind of
breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a response should produce a re-
evaluation of the economy of demand and desire. In analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where
the manifest content of the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The
result of this ‘subtraction’ is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire, not as a set of deferrals ,
avoidances or transposition, but rather as an owned political disposition. As Lacan frames it, this is a dialectical process, where at
each moment the subject is either learning to reassert the centrality of its demands, or where it is coming to terms with the impotence of the other
as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love and the test of desire that development is ordered …. Clinical experience
has shown us that this test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a real phallus,
but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it. (Lacan 1982b, p. 311) Thus, desire both has
general status and a
specific status for each subject. In other words, it is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments, but the desire and
sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan is sure that everyone's desire is somehow different and their
own – lack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language … passing through demand into desire, something from
the real, from the individual's being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and
everywhere. Lacan terms this objet petit a … petit a is different for everyone; and it can never be in substitutes for it
in which I try to refind it. (Easthope 2000, pp. 94–95) The point of this disposition is to bring the subject to a point
where they might ‘recognize and name’ their own desire, and as a result to become a political subject in
the sense of being able to truly argue for something without being dependent on the other as a support for
or organizing principle for political identity. This naming is not about discovering a latently held but hidden interiority,
rather it is about naming a practice of political subjectivization that is not solely oriented towards or
determined by the locus of the demand, determined by the contingent sets of coping strategies that orient
a subject towards others and a political order. As Lacan argues, this is the point where a subject becomes a kind
of new presence, or in the register of this essay, a new political possibility: ‘That the subject should come to recognize
and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a question of recognizing something which would be entirely
given …. In naming it, the subject creates , brings forth, a new presence in the world’ (Lacan 1988, pp. 228–229).
Alternatively, subjects can stay fixated on the demand, but in doing so they forfeit the possibility of
desire, or as Fink argues: ‘later, however, Lacan comes to see that an analysis … that … does not go far enough in
constituting the subject as desire leaves him or her stranded at the level of demand … unable to truly desire’
(Fink 1996, p. 90). What does this have to do with hysteria? A politics defined by and exhausted in demands is
definitionally a hysterical politics. The hysteric is defined by incessant demands on the other at the
expense of ever articulating a desire which is theirs. In the Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, for example, Lacan argues
that the hysteric's demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion towards one's
desire: ‘the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centred on the object, in so far as this object, das Ding, is, as
Freud wrote somewhere, the support of an aversion’ (Lacan 1997, p. 53). This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent
relationship between hysterics and their demands . On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even
authority over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of
authority is also simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one
with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand. Thus the logic of ‘as hysterics you demand a new
master: you will get it!’ At the register of manifest content, demands are claims for action and seemingly
powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a
kind of surrender. As a relation of address hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an
ostensibly repressive order than a claim for change. The limitation of the students’ call on Lacan does not
lie in the end they sought, but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its
framing of the master. Here the fundamental problem of democracy is not in articulating resistance over
and against hegemony, but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to mastery and a
deferral of desire. The difficulty in thinking hysteria is that it is both a politically effective subject
position in some ways, but that it is politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent.
If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at least a politics of interruption: imagine a world
where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or
remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed. Politics would be an impossibility, with no
site for contest or reappropriation and everything simply the working out of a structure. Hysteria is a site of interruption, in
that hysteria represents a challenge to our hypothetical system, refusing straightforward incorporation by
its symbolic logic. But, stepping outside this hypothetical non-polity, hysteria is net politically
constraining because the form of the demand, as a way of organizing the field of political enjoyment
requires that the system continue to act in certain ways to sustain its logic . Thus, though on the surface it is
an act of symbolic dissent, hysteria represents an affective affirmation of a hegemonic order, and therefore a
particularly fraught form of political subjectivization.

This negation exploits the politics of stupidity—an unreadable demand for nothing
creates a site for love and solidarity without reproducing our desire for recognition by
the Master
WELTY 2018 (William, PhD Candidate at Rutgers, TOWARDS A POLITICS OF STUPIDITY, Politics/Letters, May 30,
http://politicsslashletters.org/features/towards-politics-stupidity/)

One of the main issues with the late 20th century model of critique is its limitation to conceiving of power as prohibition or proliferation.[4] One of Lacan’s major insights was to recognize this type of

power relation at work not just in the discourse about sex or politics, as in Foucault, but in academic discourse , knowledge-based in general. Lacan describes such relations in his Discourse of the University, updating the
Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic to one of Master/Student and demonstrating how resistance often merely creates new force fields of power. In his seminar following the 1968 protests in Paris, Lacan admonishes the student protesters, many of whom were likely in the audience: “As
hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!”[5] The hysteric provides an apt starting point for a critique of political protest as a direct confrontation between protester and power, and uncoincidentally, is the epithet often hurled at the Left from the Right.[6] On one hand, the

in the very act of resistance,

hysteric is an unreadable and resistant figure, repulsed by power (sexual, or otherwise) and fighting hard against it. But simultaneously, the hysteric desires that the repressive power desires him/her back. Thus,

this subversive desire still desires “a new master,” Isn’t this the precise critique made by as Lacan articulately points out.

Angela Peoples Don’t forget: White Women voted for Trump in her now infamous sign at the 2017 Women’s March: “ ”?[7]

Peoples
On her sign, provides a more nuanced reading of the invokes a return of the repressed that combines the legacy of psychoanalysis with the activism of intersectional feminism. And, she

situation than Lacan on his own What one should avoid is would be capable. Lacan, or at least Žižek’s reading of him, anticipates and critiques a Foucauldian reading of power: “ here

the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the
result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp
of knowledge-power on one hand, subjects produced as a result .”[8] These two opposed subjectivities map onto the disagreements over feminism embodied in Peoples’ sign:

of power, and on the other, those produced yet excluded as its powerless outside. Subjectivity as
remainder provides a potential model for resistance that , that which is left over after the productions of power, is a crucial turn in understanding resistance to power. It

doesn’t fall into the trap of conceiving of power as either purely repressive or productive. Peoples’
resistance avoids a complicit form of feminism while simultaneously avoiding a knowledge- , in turn, the apocalyptic thinking of

based masculine perspective .[9] While this leftover part of subjectivity aligns nicely with what Lacan calls objet petit a, I want to highlight the farcical aspect of being out of place, which isn’t totally absent from Peoples’ posture in the
photo. The dark humor of not fitting in and being unreadable can be described by what Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkole have called “the new LOL” ( Lacan on Laughter).[10]

For Lacan, stupidity can create a movement from discourses of mastery, like the University, to a state that lacks a lack and is characterized by enjoyment. He says in Seminar XX, “Knowledge is worth just as much as it costs [coute], a pretty penny [beau-coute], in that it takes elbow-grease, and that it’s difficult. Difficult to what? Less to acquire it than to enjoy it.”[11] In a capitalist knowledge discourse based on acquisition, knowledge is easy enough to have; you can just buy it, or if worst comes to worst, simply make it up. In the “post-truth” economy, consumers will just acquire whatever knowledge fits their worldview, whether it is made up or not. However, Lacan’s economy is strictly a non-capitalist one, since knowledge is reduced to exchange value without surplus-value or profit.[12] But what does it mean that it’s difficult to enjoy? Lacan doesn’t mean that knowledge, whether real or alternative facts, can lead to happiness; surely the opposite is often true, despite how many derive a sort of vulgar enjoyment from the absurdly made-up tweets and alternative facts coming from the Right. But to enjoy (jouir) is not about acquisition, and
not about not acquiring, but something “difficult” indeed: to relate to knowledge and the Other in a way that frustrates such a lack-based economy as such. Stupidity then is not about having or lacking knowledge (as in ignorance), but rather learning how to enjoy. Such a difficult enjoyment leads us through Lacan back to Freud; as Leo Bersani has shown, enjoyment in Freud is both about having and not having pleasure.[13] And since “jouir” also means “to orgasm” in French, Bersani likewise helps to show how Freud’s notion of drive is both pleasure and unpleasure: as pleasure, it is something to be acquired, but as unpleasure, it is something to be dispelled, through orgasm. What a politics of stupidity forces us to attempt to think is a “knowledge” that, to make a bad pun on Lacan’s jouissance and Derrida’s notion of politics, is “to come”: never final, never enjoyed too much, and always in tension.[14] Such a tension aligns stupidity not with the lack of ignorance, but rather with the almost unbearable presence of the Real.

But now it seems, like the movements of jouissance or the logic of a bad joke, that we’ve just gone in a circle. Wasn’t stupidity the problem that led to Trump? Isn’t such a politics of stupidity the very opposite of resistance? Doesn’t it run the risk of supporting and propping up the workings of power, just like Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis?” Is it possible to critique knowledge based discourses while simultaneously acknowledging those that historically have been marginalized from them? Instead of mistakenly thinking of speaking out as subversion, perhaps this thought experiment mistakenly thinks of humor, joking, and stupidity as subversion. In order to address these concerns, we now turn to a different trickste r, and a non-French one at that: Ishmael Reed.

Ishmael Reed isn’t afraid of stupidity, either as an aesthetic or as subject matter. In fact, he often turns specifically to joking, clowning, circuses, and stupidity, with his work ranging from detective stories to westerns, jazz recordings to postmodernis t verbal collages. Using language similar to Lacan, he states in a recent interview, “What we ended up doing in the sixties was to revolt against the colonial masters.”[15] But rather than seeking a new form of mastery, his stupidity is a specific and often razor-sharp critique of easy answers and political orthodoxies. His first novel, The Free-lance Pallbearers , explores the country of HARRY SAM, ruled by a man of the same name: a former used-car salesman who governs from a toilet, since “he has not been seen since the day thirty years ago when he disappeared into the John with a weird ravaging illness.”[16] (Reed anticipates Alec Baldwin’s Trump toilet tweeting joke by nearly 50 years.) The main character Bukka works as an orderly cleaning up bedpans (“Make-um-shit Doopeyduk”), and when he is eventually recruited to participate in political activist art, he protests “I’m not an actor. I’m more
of a clown” (4, 107). The artist’s response? “Good [….] So are we, tweet, tweet. See you soon” (107). (Again, more tweeting.) In his second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, a western about a voodoo cowboy named The Loop Garoo Kid, Reed satirizes orthodox “political” art in the form of Bo Shmo and the neo-socialist realist gang. The Kid sneers at their idea that “All art must be for the end of liberating the masses,” and instead asks, “What’s your beef with me Bo Shmo, what if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”[17] (Again, Reed is ahead of his time, with fiction subsuming the nightly news.) Reed’s most well known novel, Mumbo Jumbo, follows the “anti-plague” Jes Grew as it “ravages” the U.S. in the 1920s, causing energy, feelings of good health, an interest in Haitian culture , and uncontrollable dancing in the streets. The secrets of Jes Grew are bound in an ancient secret text called The Work; but as the title of the novel suggests, the Work isn’t a book that contains practical knowledge. In
fact, Papa LaBas, the novel’s main character and VooDoo detective, is never able to read the Work. But that’s fine with him; he concludes, “We will make our own future text.”[18] Reed’s stupidity, then, is never content with a final answer, even when that answer comes from one of Reed’s own books. Instead, his clowning, like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s theory of “signifying” derived from readings of Reed, is always premised on revision and on future action and future texts.[19]

But how does such stupidity actually work? Isn’t this just yet another instance of vulgar postmodernist critique? While Reed’s complex work escapes such an easy criticism , stupidity does seems to work best by pointing out a lack in ideological arguments that appeal to some ultimate truth. But politics and criticism aren’t so simple anymore, if they ever were. As Latour reminds us, “the danger [of the present] would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases!”[20] In other words , isn’t stupidity now precisely the problem instead of a critical solution?

At best, the stupidity of a figure like Trump doesn’t seem to be a major issue for many of his supporters ; as I write this, polls show his approval rating among
Republicans is still in the 80s. At worst, some of the most prominent praises of Trump take on precisely these postmodern terms: Trump as the one who “tells it like it is” and reveals “facts” as “bad ideology”; as a “blockage” to the “corrupt” system of Washington; as the big Other or
subject-supposed-to-know with no desire and no stable content, who creates desire in the (conservative, middle class, white) subject. As such, he is a figure who is stupid, not just in the traditional sense, but also in Lacan’s: by lacking any lack whatsoever, and thriving politically not

through policy or reason, but through desire and revealing the lack in others (Josh Marshall calls this a “domination by denigration” strategy.[21]) Furthermore, much of the direct moments of critique to Trump – criticisms of his “policies,”
have proved unsuccessful
debates, media interviews – , at least in preventing his rise to power. During the election, such resistance seemed to only galvanize him as a figure fighting against the “liberal elite,” i.e. those with knowledge. And even

millions persist in
though his approval ratings have fallen drastically, there are still who an enjoyment of his lack of knowledge: not only an enjoyment of ignorance, but also a sadistic enjoyment at the
suffering of those harmed by Trump’s policies .[22] Again, as Latour has pointed out, direct resistance runs the risk of becoming
caught up in the system of dominance . For an example, we need look no further than how “Black Lives Matter” has been co-opted in a precise Foucaultian reformulation of the biopolitical “Make Live and Let Die” – that is
to say, “All Lives Matter.” (A declaration of sovereignty so important that Trump repeated it during his acceptance of the Republican Presidential nomination.)

But perhaps, like fire-fighting fire, stupidity can combat stupidity . This is the point I wish to turn to in the following section. But first, it should be declared emphatically that this line of argument should in no way minimize the
forms of direct resistance that many have already undertaken. Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are doing extremely important work in leveling grass-roots public critiques. Indeed, in the past year, we have seen how these direct resistances have begun to affect the Trump
White House. Rather, this thought experiment is an attempt, to borrow more of Latour’s militaristic rhetoric, to open up an additional front in this battle; I wonder how tactics of stupidity might translate into the knowledge based discourses of Academia or the journalist media, which
have seemed somewhat powerless to speak truth to power against the Right.[23]

unreadability created a direct and effective critique of Trump

By way of beginning such translation, I want to highlight a moment of that , and one that importantly

doesn’t pit knowledge against stupidity , or truth against falsity. I’m referring here to Johari Osayi Idusuyi’s protest at a Trump rally in Nov. 2015, where she simply sat behind Trump while reading a copy of Claudia
Rankine’s Citizen. Idusuyi functions as both Lacanian blockage and as unreadable presence: a bit of the Lacanian Real.[24] She is present at least seemingly as a compliant supporter. Furthermore, she is often literally unreadable on camera precisely because she is reading with a book
obscuring her face. And unlike the other protesters at the rally, who attempted to directly confront Trump and his supporters and were violently ejected, Idusuyi instead merely exists (or “persists,” to borrow McConnell’s “critique” of Elizabeth Warren) within the space of the rally. But
through such existence, she makes all the Trump supporters around her visibly uncomfortable and distracted, yet unsure precisely how to respond to this woman calmly reading. Indeed, Rachel Maddow referred to Idusuyi as an “unbowable presence,” and this is precisely what the type

of political subjectivity I am trying to theorize: an unreadable yet unbowable presence, one that functions by both blocking the discursive system and refusing to be made a part of it. This “stupidity” is a far cry from ignorance; in Lacan’s terms, it is instead a lack of a
lack .[25]

Inside the book that Idusuyi was reading, Claudia Rankine tackles many of these same issues: presence, lack, black bodies, and alternative forms of knowing. Her poetry, like Idusuyi’s presence, is also often filtered through screens; the book contains reproductions of images from YouTube videos and sports matches. Reflecting on Hennessy Youngman’s YouTube performance pieces, which “[suggest] black people’s anger is marketable,” she writes,

You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy require d to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointme nt: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.[26]

While not specifically theorizing stupidity or clowning like Reed, Rankine negotiates a complex and dialectical form of knowledge: one that combines thinking with error and transforms nouns and feelings into verbs and actions, and vice versa. In so doing, she sublates “this other kind of anger” into a new form of knowledge, one that both “clarifies” and further muddies the waters. But that is precisely the point. This anger/knowledge is not valuable because of its clarification, corres ponde nce, or truth- value — it’s not a form of “alternative facts” — but rather because of its simply being there. The knowledge-as-presence that Rankine creates inside the book perfectly complements the presence- as-knowledge created by Idusuyi at the Trump rally. Of course, this knowledge isn’t simply utopian; it might not make a difference in “the ways in which one is perceived.” Rankine continues in the next paragraph: “Recognition of this lack might break you apart. Or recognition might illuminate the erasure the attempted erasure triggers. Whether such discerning creates a healthier, if more isolated, self, you can’t know” (24). The poetic recognition of
lack as breakage in Rankine is a very real concern for proteste rs, who risk the literal breaking of their bodies in the fight to be recognized. But what Rankine holds out is a hope that such erasure might lead to more erasure: that lack might create its own lack in return. Indeed, “recognition” and “illum ination” and “erasure” all become so mixed up that ultimately, “you can’t know.” But in that space of not-knowing — of attentiveness to the Other’s desires and our own lacks of the perfect answers — perhaps a politics of stupidity can begin.[27]

is an urgent
Reflecting on the melancholia of critique, and the deadlock of the Left and the Right more generally, this new type of struggle -– characterized by stupidity, humor, and “unbowable presence” —

political and ethical necessity we . The resistor must realize that, along with Foucault, “We must not think that by saying yes to sex [and other prohibitions], one says no to power.”[28] But I would like to add here that

can’t just shout “No!” the political subject with unknowable integrity” any longer either (though we should definitely keep doing that too). In addition, “clownlike

must resist through unreadable presence ̶ and through the very act of reading her very perhaps too. We can thus draw a direct line from the
“unsuccessful” protests of Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2012, through the demands of Bernie Sanders, all the way to the recent Women’s Marches in Washington, D.C. Ishmael Reed’s “Future Text” ends up written by the bodies of the protestors; isn’t the galvanization of the Left to take to
the streets just like the “enlivening” anti-plague Jes Grew, “electric as life and […] characterized by ebullience and ecstasy” (6)? In shifting perspectives, many of the critiques against these protesters — that they are lazy and should get jobs, that they aren’t articulating coherent demands,
that their bodies aren’t really oppressed — are reformulated into the precise form of their resistance. As Rankine writes about tennis judge Mariana Alves’ notoriously bad (and seemingly racist) calls against Serena Williams, “Though no one was saying anything explicitly about Serena’s
black body, you are not the only viewer who thought it was getting in the way of Alves’s sight line” (27). Once again, she theorizes a form of literally unspoken knowledge that is found in the presence of a body as an obstruction to the dominant, white “sight line.” Lacan might even call
such an obstruction the gaze. And as both Rankine’s book and Idusuyi’s presence make clear, such a form of knowledge is present through reading.

In response to a President who tweets and doesn’t read, the unreadable presences of these readerly bodies in the streets is the perfect political response. For Lacan, in the final stage of his dialectic of desire, the subject confronts the lack in the big Other; when asked “What do you want of me?”, the big Other responds with “Nothing.” The protests against Trump reverse the terms. We might imagine a new slogan chanted at the next march:

“What do we want?”

“Nothing!”

“When do we want it?”

“NOW!”

Radical abortion rights activists in the 1960s

Of course, there are numerous literal demands that the protesters are fighting for. But such a demand for nothing is not without precedent.

presented the New York legislature with a blank piece of paper as their proposed bill, the implication
being that their bodies should not be regulated by laws in any way This posture of negativity locates .[29] , then,

power not in the figure of a new master, but in the bodies of the protestors themselves . Thus, demand
takes the form of a lack of a lack a demand that isn’t going away , but more importantly, of and a lack : one that obstructs “sight lines” through its “unbowable presence.”

Slavoj Žižek has termed this type of resistance “passive violence,” in response to the debate about whether it was OK to punch neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. (Žižek says no.)[30] But notwithstanding the schadenfreude of such violence, I have tried to shift the locus of passive violence to
stupidity, like the clowning of Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer. In so doing, I would also shift terms, both Žižek’s and my own from the early version of the paper: moving from active compliance to active, present stupidity. Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway, from the March 4th, 2017
Saturday Night Live, perfectly represents such a shift: instead of jokes or sketches, her character merely appears at brief moments throughout the broadcast, sitting in a red dress and playing with her phone, a perfect parody of the infamous “couchgate” photo of the real life Conway.[31]
This isn’t a joke per se: nothing is said, and McKinnon just repeats the same things that Conway did. But in so doing, she also enacts the same gesture of stupidity that ties these many disparate and complex forms of political resistance together as obstructive presence: from Reed’s Loop
Garoo Kid to Claudia Rankine, or from Johari Osayi Idusuyi to Melissa McCarthy. These disparate forms of stupidity return us, full circle, to Marx’s notion of history: first as tragedy, then as farce. Of course, we can’t overlook the complex histories and differences that inform these

a politics not only of stupidity, but ultimately

different acts of resistance.[32] But, taken together in a moment of contingency and solidarity, perhaps the different histories might lead to

togetherness: a togetherness that recognizes difference and the unreadability of the Other, but also
how that presence can still belong Lacan’s primary example for stupidity is love . In fact, silliness, , and nonsense .[33] Or as Rankine says towards the
close of her book, “You smile dumbly at the world because you are still feeling if only the feeling could be known and this brings on the moment you recognize as desire” (153).

Decide on questions of form prior to content- their adherence to the global capitalist
form renders content vacuous
Gržinić 12 [Marina Gržinić, another Ljubljana analyst, Biopolitics and Necropolitics in relation to the
Lacanian four discourses, September 2012, //Stefan]
Global capitalism has at its core a mechanism that simultaneously produces and eschews content ,
leaving us with an empty form – a performative repetitive mechanism so self conscious that it
neutralizes any revolutionary potential of the content . This mechanism, as I call it, (discussed in more detail below), will
help us understand what it is that makes more or less all large contemporary exhibitions and projects obsolete in terms of resistance and
critique (though they are not obsolete for those who organize, curate and take part in them). To put it another way: what we have today,
especially in big powerful exhibition projects (biennials, documentas, manifestas, etc.), are a
myriad of artworks that present as
content unbelievable features of contemporary capitalist exploitations and expropriations ; these
‘features’ are more and more visible, artists show it all, tout court, without any mediation. These art exhibitions
present artworks that show capitalist corruption, police repression, massacres of people and animals, all made
visible with more and more drastically elaborated dimensions, reasons, connections of exploitation,
expropriation, executions: but all remain impotent. Even as it is presented, the content is simultaneously made
obsolete through a repetitive performative mechanism that functions as a process of extracting
meaning, in the sense of voiding or emptying. These forms of performance present and encapsulate a process of
emptying (not only of diminishing, but in many cases completely nullifying) what at the level of content was made visible. In the past,
social reality was presented as ‘normal’ on the level of content. Therefore on the level of the (art) form, it
was necessary to produce something ‘abnormal’ – something as a formal invention or as an excess, as an excessive surplus (in
accordance with the social and political system in which it appeared, be it socialism or capitalism) – in order to say that what was commonly
accepted as ‘normality’ was in fact a lie. But what we have today is precisely the obverse; on the level of content the world is
captured as it is, in all its dimensions of abnormality, monstrosity, exploitation, expropriation, while on
the level of form, this abnormality is normalized and presented in such a way that the power and
meaning of extreme content becomes empty, obsolete. Thus content becomes abnormal while the form
is normal. Moreover, the form is being so snobbishly stylized, so to speak, that it is going out of all proportion. I want to say that the
performativity with which the form is acknowledged in its representation undermines any possibility of
critical meaning; this is what I mean by ‘performative repetitive mechanism’. In such a situation, the knowledge that is
‘captured’ through scientific or artistic work is transformed through a performative politics of repetition into a purely ideological
artefact, but with the proviso that the performativity of the process absolves us from the responsibility of seriously considering it. As a result,
what we get is not just an upside (turned) down, but ideology made again ‘unconscious’ and presented in the form of a game or joke that is
given a life of its own. If we follow Althusser’s definition of ideology7 as
a deformed representation of the imaginary
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence (by which he meant the relations of production), then
what ideology misrepresents today is not reality, but itself. It behaves as a cognizant post-Fordist
mechanism that takes the presented operation of ideology’s materiality as its raw material, as its
content. But what does this mean, precisely? Today, art makes imaginary what was already identified as material;
through the repetitive performative ideological mechanism, it translates the materiality of ideology and
its apparatus onto imaginary levels. The materiality of ideology is made redundant, nullified and
emptied through repetitive (ideological) performative mechanisms. To put it another way, what is clear and self-
evident on the level of content is, on the level of form, made to be obsolete, ridiculous, not sexy or attractive enough,
not obvious enough. The materiality of ideology is treated as raw material to be integrated in
performative representations where this materiality is consciously relegated to the level of the
imaginary.
AFF answers
 Non-Falsifiable
Psychoanalysis is non-falsfiable, totalizes the conditions for violence, and can’t be
scaled up to politics.
Robinson ‘8 (Andrew; August 2008; Ph.D., political theorist and activist based in UK Contemporary
Theory, specialist on psychoanalysis; Avenel, Vol. 7, Issue 3 “The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory,
Politics,” p. 351; ZR)

By his own admission, Stavrakakis does not provide blueprints (which is unsurprising), nor does he
provide prescriptions, political direction or policy proposals (pp. 13-14, 30). This leaves the work of
dubious relevance to people doing politics whether as activists, politicians or administrators. The aim is
rather to argue for radical democracy as 'the institutionalization of a mechanism which enables the
continuous re-articulation of the symbolic field constituting society' (p. 129). The author makes very
broad claims about this function of democracy, which is 'the most pressing task' of politics (p. 60), the
only way to ensure permanent creation of the new (p. 60) and the only legitimate form of hegemony (p.
256). The argumentation backing up these claims mostly amounts to assertion and exegesis. However,
this is not simply a case for existing liberal democracies. Radical democracy is contrasted with existing
democracies (pp. 255-256) and is taken to imply a change in the arrangement of jouissance . Instead of
the fantasies pervasive today, typified by their blaming of the other for the incompleteness of the self,
Stavrakakis proposes a passage to feminine jouissance that encircles the lack (pp. 22-23, 111, 144, 268,
278-279). Present democracies have been hit by an assault on the two pillars of modern democracy --
equality and liberty -- by the neoliberals and neoconservatives, respectively, leading to a 'post-political'
world in which conflict is avoided and thus returns as social problems, and in which a new, almost pre-
democratic despotism is taking shape (pp. 263-264). Despite this, democracy can still function as 'the
mobilising force, the common denominator, for a politics of alternatives' (p. 258). These political
conclusions are dubious. Liberal democracies in fact tend to be quite closed to change and to be
supplemented with aggressive nationalist and racist identities. The liberal state, like the authoritarian
state, tends to essentialize itself as a form in such a way as to deny its own contingency. It is not clear
that the radical democratic framework guarantees basic rights or prevents the state from making
essentialist claims on others. Stavrakakis assumes that the democratic form itself directly achieves the
goal of recognizing contingency (p. 141). Yet this cannot be the case, since as Stavrakakis admits, this
form does not prevent actually existing democracies from being inflected with fantasmatic projects such
as ultranationalism, or degenerating into a 'post-political' disavowal of conflict. Further, whichever party
gets in power -- by majority will or procedural hitch -- is generally able to ignore intransigent realities,
pursue its own fantasmatic actings-out and repress, foreclose, disavow or otherwise silence whatever
forms of social otherness are not to its tastes. Beyond this, there is a fantasmatic frame of the liberal-
democratic state that pits the permanent institutions such as the police, bureaucracy and secret service
against semi-permanent Others, hence displacing real social antagonisms into narratives of 'crime',
'disorder', 'terrorism', 'madness', 'anarchy' and so on. Can this fundamental fantasy be traversed
without shattering the frame of the 'democratic' state itself? One might also wonder if the 'politics of
alternatives' has not already emerged -- and passed by entirely the radical democrats -- in the form of
the anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal movements. The linking of Lacanian theory to liberal democracy
seems just too convenient. One cannot but be reminded of the Soviet-era dissidents whose critiques of
the existing regimes ended up reproducing them in their proposed alternatives -- hence operating as
the fantasmatic supplement of the regimes themselves. Surely a full acceptance of social contingency
would generate social relations radically different from those pertaining in a society where such
acceptance has not occurred. Acceptance of contingency might, for instance, necessitate the elimination
of punishment, which involves a fantasy frame blaming the other (the criminal) for social conflict and
risk; it would instead require that risk be assumed by all social actors and not displaced into special
'exceptional' spaces. It would seem to imply that the state needs to be constrained from the outside by
other institutions, that a social order where power is negotiated or contested among multiple
institutions is better than one where a single site monopolizes the field of social power. Or maybe it
would be better served by the fluidity of affinity and the looseness of custom than by the fixity of state
and law. Perhaps the revival of activities inscribing agonism and difference emerge, not inside the state,
but in societal relations, oppositional movements and everyday life. While the Lacanianism of the title is
self-explanatory, it raises another problem -- why the 'left' in 'Lacanian left'? Stavrakakis defines 'left' as
meaning a democratic legitimation of antagonism and 'alternatives' (p. 30), a definition that begs the
question, identifying the 'left' directly with Lacanianism. This is pretty much unrecognizable in relation to
general usage, in which 'left' is generally associated with the welfare or self-assertion of the worst-off,
and the prioritizing of substantive social issues over property, propriety and order. Is Lacanian theory
really 'left' in this more usual sense? It is, on Stavrakakis's own admission, 'subversive' rather than
'revolutionary' (pp. 2, 158) and has a 'reformist direction' (p. 109). What this means in concrete terms is
that the structural frame is taken as unchangeable but the elements within it can be reshuffled.
'Exclusion and antagonism may be unavoidable, but acknowledging this does not restrict our ability to
influence their particular articulations, to displace continuously the limits they impose' (p. 226). Again in
common with other 'radical democrats', Stavrakakis says little to reassure either the excluded or
included of the present that they will not be the losers of such a reshuffling; it is unclear as to who will
be excluded in this process, and indeed, if any one exclusion can be deemed ethically worse than any
other. At best it is possible that the presently marginalized could come out on top from such reshuffling.
However, this is not the main aim of Lacanian theory, which has more to do with the recognition of
contingency, rejection of 'utopianism' and defence of liberal-democratic regimes -- of the 'situationness',
or ordering as such, of society, along with its 'eventness' or the recurrence of radical acts (pp. 156-157).
This leads to assertions of the need for hierarchical power. For instance, authority is taken as inevitable
in all social situations; it is 'a frame presupposed in every social experience' (p. 173). 'Without someone
in command reality disintegrates' (p. 174). Such an orientation has a long history, but it is a history of
the right, not the left, associated particularly with anti-communist liberals such as Popper, Kolakowski
and Berlin, and traceable to the classical liberalism of authors such as Jefferson, de Tocqueville and J.S.
Mill, who viewed constitutionality, political pluralism and a competitive 'marketplace of ideas' as
necessary to impede the totalitarian tendencies of any one perspective taken alone. Contingency, anti-
utopianism, a humble acceptance of limits to knowledge and action, the primacy of lack in human
experience, are all paralleled in this older tradition. <<<Continues next page>>> The strengths and
weaknesses of the text largely follow from the usefulness and limits of the perspective it provides. The
Lacanian perspective, as a partial truth, certainly provides interesting insights and a different way of
seeing, and as such often generates productive contributions. However, it fails drastically to understand
the partiality of its own 'truth'. In Stavrakakis's words, lack can't be signified but it can be formalized (p.
279). In other words, a final map of the structure of reality can still, from this perspective, be drawn --
and has been drawn already by Lacan. In effect, the result is a claim to be the theoretical end of history
-- all else is utopian, essentialist and so on. In many respects, the perspective is also reactive, defined by
what it is against (anti-essentialist, anti-utopian, anti-fantasmatic). It is less clear what it is for --
although the idea of feminine jouissance begins the task of constructing a positive pole. Its relation to
the other is very intolerant and dismissive. It is not open to other voices because it is always ready to
judge the other as failing its own rigid internal criteria. It expresses a dangerous urge to drive the other
out of the community of speakers, and perhaps out of existence altogether. The chapter on Castoriadis
is symptomatic here. Castoriadis in many ways stands for the entire field of horizontalist radicalism --
horizontalists and immanentists (Stirner, Reich, Negri, Deleuze, Marcuse, various critics of Lacan) circle
around the text like barbarians at the gates. The dispute between Lacanianism and horizontalism is a
dispute the stakes of which Lacanians are reluctant to confront, instead hiding behind the view from one
side -- 'they disagree with us, therefore they are wrong'. Except that 'wrong' is usually replaced by one
of a number of theoretical epithets -- romantic, utopian, essentialist -- which sound superficially like
useful categories of theory but which are never defined and which serve mainly as a name to call people
who disagree with one or another basic Lacanian assumption. The impression is given that those who
hold these perspectives are somehow naïve, intellectually disreputable or unrespectable, but this
connoted claim is never demonstrated. It is simply a choice of one perspective over another, conveyed
in loaded language. Like most of its ilk, this book does plenty to show what Lacanian theory does, how it
'works' as a theoretical machine or toolkit, but rather less to say why it should be preferred to other
approaches (assuming, of course, that not wanting to be called names is insufficient reason to accept its
validity). Lacanian theory suffers from an ontological and epistemological restrictiveness derived from
its absolutizing of structural topologies, which limits its explanatory power by rendering far too many
specificities of metropolitan statist societies 'necessary' or 'unavoidable'. The theory involves restrictive,
totalizing claims that are neither logically necessary nor empirically demonstrated; most often,
acceptance of such claims is unnecessary to gain the benefits of the explanatorily or theoretically useful
aspects of the perspective. Social phenomena vary in how well they fit this limiting frame. Nationalism
and racism, having the right form, fit well, and hence become favourite expository targets for Lacanian
theorists. But dogmas will have to be sacrificed if a broader field of social movements is to be
encompassed.
 Psycho bad
Psycho bad - Psychoanalysis has always been weaponized against abolitionist groups
and radicals and used to minimize the impact of their work – John Brown, William
Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld prove – empirics
Rothbard 6 (Murray N. Rothbard was an economist at the Austrian school, historian, economist, and
political theorist. “Psychoanalysis as a Weapon”. Mises Daily Articles. Oct 13 2006.
https://mises.org/library/psychoanalysis-weapon solenne)

Psycho-history has most often been used as a weapon against radical groups in the past . Any radical
group that challenged the status quo is assumed ipso facto to be crazy or neurotic, people whose
ideas and behavior have to be "explained." The "explanation" of course is never that they had
perceived what they considered to be a grave injustice in society and were trying to set it right. Whether
their theory of justice is correct or not is really beside the point . The point is that the psycho-historian
has always implicitly assumed that the status quo, whatever it is, is normal, so that opposition to it is
neurotic and abnormal and needs "explanation." The leading example of this smear of radicals through
psychologizing has been the conventional historians' treatment of abolitionists, a treatment that has only been modified in recent
years. In setting themselves squarely and openly against what they considered the monstrous injustice of

slavery, the abolitionists, especially the militant Garrisonian wing, let themselves in for psycho-
historical abuse as well as vilification during their lifetime. Thus, the popular textbook by Hofstadter,
Miller, and Aaron refers to William Lloyd Garrison as "wayward" and "neurotic. " Hazel C. Wolf, in her
revealingly titled work, On Freedom's Altar, the Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement, describes
the abolitionist Theodore Weld as someone who "gloried in the persecution he suffered ," and who
"lovingly wore the martyr's crown of thorns." As for poor Garrison, "he had a mania for uniqueness and
attention." Perhaps the basest rhetoric–to use Szasz's stirring term–was David Donald's outrageous and
patently untrue assertion that the abolitionists were dismayed at the freeing of the slaves because it
ended a crusade which had brought them "purpose and joy" ; Lincoln as emancipator was for them "the
killer of the dream." To wrap it up, Professor Donald manages to smear the abolitionist and laissez-faire
Senator Charles Sumner as impotent and latently homosexual, and to conclude that "This holy blissful
martyr thrived upon his torments."5 The base message in all this is clear. Radicals who see injustice in the status
quo are neurotic; if they are persecuted, who cares, for after all that's what they really wanted; and
whether or not they achieved their goals doesn't matter because they cared not about the goal but only
about the trouble-making struggle itself .6 Blaming radicals for their own persecution is akin to another
reversal tactic frequently practiced by Freud. Thus, in one of my favorite works of Tom Szasz–the unfortunately neglected Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors–Szasz writes of
Freud's response when one of his entourage, Fritz Wittels, delivered a psychoanalytic "character assassination" (as Szasz correctly calls it) of Freud's brilliant critic, Karl Kraus. Freud's reaction was that "we have reason to be grateful
to Wittels for making so many sacrifices." On which Szasz comments: This is one of Freud's characteristic verbal tricks, which he often applied to his own attacks on others as well; it is not Kraus who was sacrificed by Wittels, but

! It is a good tactic if one can get away with it, and, by and large, Freud got away with it .7
Wittels who has sacrificed himself

Of all the abolitionists, the most hated and denounced as neurotic or psychotic by psycho-historians was
the most radical of the lot, John Brown. Brown not only denounced slavery, he took up arms against it;
in doing so, he killed people. To denounce war or killing as neurotic or psychotic per se would condemn
a large portion of the human race, past and present . Moreover, Brown was grim and had no sense of humor. He spoke of slavery as a
sin, and of the necessity of "purging this land with blood." But then, all the evangelical pietists of the day
spoke in similar terms. They–and this means the bulk of the Protestant sects in the Northern United States from 1830 or so onward–were deeply religious, and they believed it their bounded duty for their
own salvation to do their best to "make society holy" and to "purge this land of sin." Most evangelical pietists were grim, humorless folk, and their definition of sin unfortunately went far beyond a libertarian hostility to slavery;
Demon Rum, gambling, the breaking of the Sabbath, and membership in the Roman Catholic Church stood, in their eyes, as almost as sinful as slavery, and once slavery was out of the way, most of them determined to use force, if
necessary, to purge the land of these activities too. So, as I said earlier, none of these people, not Garrison, and certainly not John Brown, would have made charming cocktail party companions. But this does not make them
 Neither does John Brown's
"neurotic" or "sick"; just passionate and determined men who found sin and injustice, some in areas where I would agree and other where I would emphatically disagree.

raid on Harper's Ferry qualify him as a nut because the raid manifestly failed. Brown's raid was based on
cogent theories of guerrilla warfare, and particularly on a plan set forth a year earlier by the libertarian Lysander Spooner. The idea was to get arms in a
dramatic and much-publicized raid, and then to go off into the hills to form what we would now call
guerrilla foco in the South, which would attract runaway slaves, and which could be used as a base for
guerrilla raids upon slaveholders, either freeing numbers of slaves or holding the masters as hostages
and forcing them to set the slaves free.8 Generally, radicals are dismissed by psycho-historians as people
with Oedipal problems, people who, in their unresolved hostility to "the father," are lashing out at the
State, or at contemporary institutions. Fortunately, however, psychoanalysis also provides us with a tu
quoque, or "you're another," weapon as a counter-punch. For radicals can always retort: "No. You, in
defending the State and the current status quo, are neurotically attached to your father!" Both sets of
nonsense, it seems to me, cancel each other out, and then we can all turn to substantive matters. The
availability of this counter-thrust is part of the methodological weakness that psychoanalysis shares
with other determinist creeds For all determinist beliefs implicitly assume that the determinist is
magically exempt from the determined system and that he, at least, possesses free will and the ability to
learn the truth..
 psycho bad
Psychoanalysis is ultra-extremist—cannot be used as an interrogation of the
political and doesn’t solve for anything
Sharp and Boucher 2010 [Matthew, Geoff. Sharpe is a professor of writing at various institutions including Columbia
University, Bard College, the New College of Florida, and Wesleyan University. Boucher lectures in literary studies and psychoanalytic studies at
Deakin University. He has published articles on Žižek in Telos and is co-editor of Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Essays on Slavok Žižek. “Žižek’s
Push towards the Act.” Žižek And Politics: a Critical Introduction, by Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, Edinburgh University Press, 2010.] //
afre

Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms the ultra- ? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of Žižek’s political Romanticism, no one has argued that

extremism of Žižek’s political position might refl ect his untenable attempt to shape his model for
political action on the curative fi nal moment in clinical psychoanalysis differences between these two . The

realms are nearly too many and too great to restate

, listed in Figure 5.1, Lacan’s notion of – which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is this.

traversing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of people’s subjective structure: a refounding
of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference . This is undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the

analysands
basis of the analysands’ voluntary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity. The , in transforming their subjective world, change the way they

do not transform the world. The political relevance of the clinic can only be (a)
regard the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they

as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b) as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that the
political subject and its social object are ultimately identical . Option (b), Žižek’s option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only through his (mis)

according to Žižek, we can analyse the

recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose ‘traversal of the fantasy’ is immediately identical with his transformation of the socio- political system or Other. Hence,

institutional embodiments of this Other using psychoanalytic categories . In Chapter 4, we saw Žižek’s resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective)

This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single subject–object, whose perverse
Ego Ideal and the (objective) Symbolic Order.

(or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life . Žižek’s decisive political-

any political change

theoretic errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The substantive problem is to equate worth the name with the total change of the subject–object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a

can only mean equating politics with violent regime change, and ultimately embracing dictatorial
type of change that

government the ultra- political form of Žižek’s criticism

, as Žižek now frankly avows (IDLC 412–19). We have seen that is of everyone else, the theoretical Left and the wider politics,

that no one is suffi ciently radical for him because Žižek’s model of politics proper – even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is

is modelled on a pre- critical analogy with the total transformation of a subject’s entire subjective
structure, at the end of the talking cure We have seen that Zizek equates . For what could the concrete consequences of this governing analogy be?  

the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an entire people. The social fantasy, he says,
structures the regime's 'inherent transgressions' If political : at once subjects' habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regime's myths of origin and of identity. 

action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete 'traversal'  - in Hegel's terms, the abstract versus the determinate negation - of
all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding of of entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the first Žižekian political subject was Schelling’s divided God, who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning

can the political theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on  all
of time (IDLC 153; OB 144–8). But 

their inherited ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately
asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see,
after they have acceded to the Great Leap Forward? And if they do not – for Žižek laments that today
subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways  – what means can the theorist and his
allies use to move them to do so? Biting the
Žižek, as ever, does not shrink from drawing the only possible conclusion: the politics of the Act is a politics of voluntaristic, groundless or ‘divine’ violence (IDLC 162).

pessimistic bullet, Žižek2 indeed maintains that all political power (and even all speech itself) is tainted
with ‘obscene violence’ This is an extrapolation (IDLC 378; OV 58–72; PV 307) of of his claim that there is no Law and Symbolic Order without the superego, which we saw in Chapter 4. It is a repackaging

(neo)conservative
the position on civilisation’s ineradicable discontents whose bleakness invites us to
, later Freudian, ,

wonder how any power could be legitimated as better than any othe r. So it is understandable that Žižek has attracted the critical charge that he is a Schmittian ‘ultra-

Žižek
politician’: someone who militarises politics. Tellingly, his only response is to argue that, while the ‘Right’ externalises political confl ict into war, the ‘Left’ accepts that confl ict rives societies from within: this is class struggle. So does not give any ground, as we will see, on
 believes not in draining the Zuider Zee of irrational drives, but in
the equation of politics with potentially violent confl ict between competing ‘concrete universals’. It is as if he

learning to swim in it better than the antagonist can . Žižek’s move is to go from describing politics as based on traversing the fantasy to resting his model for revolutionary agency on the later
Lacan’s diffi cult notion that the end of the cure involves identifying with the sinthome. Notably, like Freud’s later notion of the intractable death drive, this sinthome responds to the later Lacan’s pessimism about the power of the talking cure. As per Žižek’s critique of Stavrakakis above, it
names an unmediatisable, unchanging ‘knot’ of Jouissance. It lies at the subject’s most singular, idiosyncratic heart: an exceptional or ‘extimate’ mode of enjoyment that it can neither traverse nor publicly avow. When Žižek2 applies this to the political subject–object, the sinthome turns
out to be those whom Žižek calls ‘proletarian’: groups who represent the ‘part of no- part’ (IDLC 428; PV 268). Although they are parts of the existing order, they are absolutely unrecognised and excluded from the rest of the expressive totality. As we saw above, Žižek thinks our sinthome
today are the slum- dwellers and other lumpenproletariat that mass at the gates of the global order’s great cities (IDLC 424–6).

Even if they win superior explanatory power, psychoanalytic imaginings

are useless in advancing political change
Rosen-Carole 10 Adam, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, 2010, “Menu Cards in Time of Famine: On
Psychoanalysis and Politics,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXIX, No. 1, p. 205-207

On the other hand, though in these ways and many others, psychoanalysis seems to promote the sorts of subjective dispositions and habits requisite for a thriving democracy,
and though in a variety of ways psychoanalysis contributes to personal emancipation— say, by releasing individuals from self-defeating, damaging, or petrified forms action and

to what extent, if at all, can the habits

reaction, object attachment, and the like—in light of the very uniqueness of what it has to offer, one cannot but wonder:

psychoanalytic practice survive, let alone flourish, under modern social and
and dispositions—broadly, the forms of life—cultivated by

political conditions? If the emancipatory inclinations and democratic virtues that psychoanalytic practice promotes are systematically
crushed or at least regularly unsupported by the world in which they would be realized, then isn’t psychoanalysis implicitly making
promises it cannot redeem? Might not massive social and political transformations be the condition for the efficacious practice of psychoanalysis?
And so, under current conditions, can we avoid experiencing the forms of life nascently cultivated by psychoanalytic practice as something of a tease, or even a source of deep

the worry is whether political diagnoses and

frustration? (2) Concerning psychoanalysis as a politically inclined theoretical enterprise,

proposals that proceed on the basis of psychoanalytic insights and forms of attention partake of a fantasy of
interpretive efficacy (all the world’s a couch, you might say), wherein our profound alienation from the conditions for robust political agency are
registered and repudiated? Consider, for example, Freud and Bullitt’s (1967) assessment of the psychosexual determinants of Woodrow Wilson’s political aspirations and
impediments, or Reich’s (1972) suggestion that Marxism should appeal to psychoanalysis in order to illuminate and redress neurotic phenomena that generate disturbances in

Žižek’s (1993, 2004), Derrida’s (2002) and others’

working capacity, especially as this concerns religion and bourgeois sexual ideology. Also relevant are Freud’s,

death drive, as well as Marcuse’s (1970) proposal that we attend

insistence that we draw the juridical and political consequences of the hypothesis of an irreducible

to the weakening of Eros and the growth of aggression that results from the coercive enforcement of the reality principle upon the
sociopolitically weakened ego, and especially to the channeling of this aggression into hatred of enemies. Reich (1972) and Fromm (1932) suggest that psychoanalysis be
employed to explore the motivations to political irrationality, especially that singular irrationality of joining the national-socialist movement, while Irigaray (1985) diagnoses the
desire for the Same, the One, the Phallus as a desire for a sociosymbolic order that assures masculine dominance. Žižek (2004) contends that only a psychoanalytic exposition
of the disavowed beliefs and suppositions of the United States political elite can get at the fundamental determinants of the Iraq War. Rose (1993) argues that it was the
paranoiac paradox of sensing both that there is every reason to be frightened and that everything is under control that allowed Thatcher “to make this paradox the basis of
political identity so that subjects could take pleasure in violence as force and legitimacy while always locating ‘real’ violence somewhere else—illegitimate violence and illicitness

increasingly made subject to the law” (p. 64). Stavrakakis (1999) advocates that we recognize and traverse the residues of
utopian fantasy in our contemporary political imagination.1 Might not the psychoanalytic interpretation of powerful figures (Bush,
Bin Laden, or whomever), collective subjects (nations, ethnic groups, and so forth), or urgent “political” situations register an anxiety

regarding political impotence or “castration” that is pacified and modified by the fantasmatic frame wherein the psychoanalytically inclined

political theorist situates him- or herself as diagnosing or interpretively intervening in the lives of political figures, collective political subjects, or

complex political situations with the idealized efficacy of a successful clinical intervention? If so, then the question is: are the contributions of

psychoanalytically inclined political theory anything more than tantalizing menu cards for meals it
cannot deliver? As I said, the worry is twofold. These are two folds of a related problem, which is this: might the very seductiveness of psychoanalytic theory and
practice—specifically, the seductiveness of its political promise—register the lasting eclipse of the political and the objectivity of the social, respectively? In other words,

might not everything that makes psychoanalytic theory and practice so politically attractive indicate
precisely the necessity of wide-ranging social/institutional transformations that far exceed the powers of

psychoanalysis? And so, might not the politically salient transformations of subjectivity to which psychoanalysis
can contribute overburden subjectivity as the site of political transformation, blinding us to
the necessity of largescale institutional reforms? Indeed, might not massive institutional transformations be necessary conditions for the efficacy of

psychoanalytic practice, both personally and politically? Further, might not the so-called interventions and proposals of psychoanalytically inclined political theory similarly

sidestep the question of the institutional transformations necessary for their realization, and so
conspire with our blindness to the enormous institutional impediments to a progressive political future?
 perm = key
Best option is psychoanalysis paired with political action—perm key
Homer 1996 [Sean, Associate professor of literature at the University of Bulgaria. "Psychoanalysis, representation, politics: on the (im)
possibility of a psychoanalytic theory of ideology?." The Letter: Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis 7 (1996): pg. 102-105.] // afre

It is at this point that I wish to draw back and resist the temptations of both postmarxism and postmodernism. And it is also at this point that I wish to return to my second concern with this particular historical conjucture of May '68. I have emphasised the rapprochement that took place
between Marxism and psychoanalysis post 1968 but what I have omitted from the discussion thus far is that these were but two of a much broader and more complex alliance, an alliance that was informed, above all, by feminism as well as a wide ranging critique of philosophical

Psychoanalysis, and this is for me where it ties back to questions of pedagogy,

foundationalism and the politicised semiotics of Barthes and Kristeva.

was but one amongst a number of discourses and it was the specific conjuncture of these distinct
discourses that created the critical space within which they operated. the political dimension of this Furthermore,

project was not the practice of theoretical discourse per se but rather the intervention of theoretical
discourse in the terrain of ideology . For instance, it is not simply a case of how to teach psychoanalysis in the University that is the issue of this conference but 'what' we are teaching with it. If

psychoanalysis creates a radical, critical and destablising space in within the Universities (and if it doesn't I see no point in teaching it), then it does so, I believe,

conjunction with other discourses Psychoanalysis is not the answer but the problem and what is at .

stake is the political implications of psychoanalytic theory and practice . I will come back to this in my concluding remarks. What I now want to do is to restage this
debate and attempt to forestall what I identified above as the theoretical and political impasse of post-marxism in the light of the possibility of a psychoanalytic theory of ideology. For if psychoanalysis has anything to offer political theory in general or the politics of representation in

According to Zizek the psychoanalytic theory of ideology has regressedsomewhat from

particular it is in the field of ideology.

Althusser's first exploratory steps . Let me be quite clear here, I do not see Althusser as the final word in this debate. His reformulation of the Marxian concept of ideology as the imaginary representation of the subjects real
conditions of existence was notoriously under-theorised, just as his use and understanding of Lacan was seriously questionable. What I want to suggest is more modest, that is, that Althusser mapped a certain problematic of the subject, representation and ideology that we remain within

. I now seem to read a great deal, for instance, about subjectivity and representation
but now all too often seek to evade or obfuscate

but very little about ideology and the political implications of, say, multiple subject positions, or, the
subject in process.  Zizek articulated this problem succinctly in The Sublime Object of Ideology, when he suggested that the elision of the Althusserian/Lacanian debate masked a deeper problematic. To quote Zizek: There is something enigmatic in the

it cannot be explained away in terms of a theoretical defeat. - It is more as if there

sudden eclipse of the Althusserian school: 

were theory, a traumatic kernel which had to be quickly forgotten, 'repressed', it is an effective
, in Althusser's 

case of theoretical amnesia . This 'traumatic kernel' is, for Zizek, that impossible encounter with the Real, whilst that effective moment of theoretical amnesia, I want to argue, is the political. The critique of the Althusserian position is now
well established and in my view substantively correct, so I will restrict myself to those criticisms which pertain to Zizek's work, principally Althusser's failure to successfully think through the relationship between his ideological apparatuses and the interpellation of individuals as ideological
subjects. Briefly, Althusser never theorised how the ideological structures he identified were internalised by subjects and, furthermore, Althusser failed to account for the fact that his interpellated subjects were always already ideological subjects in the same sense that they had been

. , ideology
subjected to prior subjectification According to Zizek, therefore, Althusser's error was to locate ideology in the wrong order. For Marxism ideology is always a question of consciousness, or, more precisely of false consciousness. For Zizek, however

does not work at the level of consciousness but rather below it , - it is not an illusion masking reality but a fundamental misrecognition at the level of social reality itself. As

The illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what people
Zizek puts it: 

are doing. What they do not know is their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a
fetishistic inversion .11 What Zizek calls the ideological fantasy unconsciously structures our social reality. Such an account of ideology, I might add, is not in-itself inconsistent with certain variants within Marxism. What psychoanalysis adds to the situation

The internalisation of ideological structures can never fully

is an insistence on the structural necessity of the failure of ideological interpellation. 

succeed,... ... there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness
sticking to it, Ideology is not an illusion which masks
 and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it.11  , then, 

social reality it is a fantasy-structure which serves to support that very reality and thereby to
. On the contrary, 

mask a more intractable impossible real kernel . The function of ideology', writes Zizek, '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'.13 Zizek's manoeuvre is significant and I believe opens the way for a properly psychoanalytic theory of ideology. What he highlights is not only the bad faith of ideology, its imaginary illusory dimension, but also its pleasure, that inseparable and unaccountable
element of surplus-enjoyment on which the function of ideology hinges. Indeed, it is the very aim of ideology to conceal the element of surplusenjoyment proper to the ideological form. There is in Zizek's formulation, then, a certain compensatory exchange. We are not merely duped into
believing that this is the best of all possible worlds, that there is no alternative, but gain something in a very 'real' sense. That is, in the sense of what Zizek identifies as the radical ambiguity of the real as both a non-symbolized kernel that returns and disrupts the symbolic and at the same
time as contained in that very symbolic form, as 'immediately rendered by this form'.14 It is this notion of radical ambiguity in relation to the aim and function of ideology that I want to hang onto and to attempt to link up with a second aspect of Zizek's theory.
 death drive fails
Even Freud doubted the death drive.
Dufresne 2000 [Todd. Canadian social and cultural theorist best known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of
psychoanalysis. He is Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Tales from the Freudian Crypt:
the Death Drive in Text and Context. Stanford University Press, 2000. Pages 15-17.] // afre
Freud grew very attached to his new dualism, especially the death drive, later admitting that "I can no longer think in any other way" (1930: I 19) . As he put it in BPP: "We make this
assumption [about the existence of a death drive] thus carelessly because it does not seem to be an assumption" (192oa: 44).Years later, he would bluntly mock those who rejected the death-
drive theory, echoing Goethe's line that: "little children do not like it" when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to "badness," to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty
as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil .. . with His all-powerfulness or His

all-goodness. (1930: 120) Despite Freud's commitment to the death drive, it is true that at times he gave the
appearance of being less dogmatic about it than about some other innovations during his long career.
This tolerant side perhaps reflects Freud's ambivalence about the theory , especially in the beginning, but it is more likely a good
example of his seductive style of argumentation: rhetorically he admits the weakness of his (manifest) arguments the better to substantiate his (latent)

position. For example, about his new speculations Freud qualifies in BPP that " I am not convinced myself and . . . do not seek to persuade

other people to believe in them" (192oa: 59). Elsewhere in this work Freud even cautions his reader to "consider or dismiss
[what follows] according to his individual predilection " (24). It is possible that by this time 16 THE HETEROGENEOUS 'BEYOND' THE
HETEROGENEOUS 'BEYOND' 17 in his career Freud realized that he was not entirely free to adjust his creation to fit his personal fancies; psychoanalysis had evidently

become a hard piece of a shared reality . Confronted by disciples who were often, as Martin Peck aptly puts it, "More Freudian than is Freud himself" (1930:
53), Freud was more than ever inclined to smooth the way into his new views. As he concedes at one point, much of his essay is

"speculation, often far-fetched speculation" (192oa: 24). That Freud, at least on the surface, initially doubted his own
commitment to the innovations of BPP led Jones to suggest, a bit dubiously, that "while writing it Freud had no audience in
mind beyond himself" (1957: 266; cf. de M'Uzan 1977). 2In a letter of June 16, 1920, to Max Eitingon, Freud admits that "many people will shake their heads over it" (in Jones
1957: 4o). It is also true that in later years Freud continued to dampen the enthusiasm that his followers occasionally showed for the "findings" of BPP. In a letter of June 17, 1937, to Princess

Marie Bonaparte, Freud writes: "Please do not overestimate my remarks about the destructive instinct. They were only tossed off and should be
carefully thought over if you propose to use them publicly " (in Jones 1957: 465). Freud even suggests that BPP had
become too popular and, for that reason, was probably wrongheaded. In a letter to Eitingon, March 27, 1921, Freud writes with his characteristic irony, "For Beyond I

have been sufficiently punished. It is very popular, is bringing me lots of letters and expressions of praise. I must have done something very stupid there "

(in Schur 1972: 343). "On this last point," historian Ronald Clark chortles, "he may have been right" (1980: 432). If Freud himself could express public and

private caution about the death drive, both during and after its inception, we cannot be surprised that his speculative revisions
were often rejected by many observers, including his most loyal followers. For Wilhelm Reich, although the death drive began as a tentative hypothesis, it "was not only not given

up—it led to nothing good . Some analysts even contend that they have direct evidence of the death instinct" (1952: 232, n. i). Reich has a point. According to Ferenczi, Freud
himself came to believe that epilepsy "express[ed] the frenzy of a tendency to self-destruction" (1929: 102); and Ferenczi, always the eager disciple, thought he could corroborate this mistaken

more commentators rejected than accepted Freud's theory . In a typical assessment, William
idea (102-103). It is understandable that

McDougall concludes that Freud's notion of a death drive is "the most bizarre monster of all his gallery of monsters "

(1936: 64).Years later Ernest Becker would echo this sentiment, concluding that the death-drive theory "can now be securely relegated to

the dust bin of history " (1973: 99; cf. Sulloway 1979: 394). On the other hand, like so much Freudian theory, the idea of a death drive seems immune to criticism. An untestable piece of mythology, it has entered popular psychology just as assuredly as the "Freudian slip." It is, for example, often recalled when thoughts turn to
the Second World War. In a recent article in the New Yorker, novelist John Updike states "that this disagreeable mythology, proposed in 1932 [sic], gathered credibility as Hitler rose to power the next year" (1996: 64). As the French analyst JeanBertrand Pontalis rightly suggests, "It is as though the metaphors of Beyond the Pleasure Principle have become, fifty years later, those of
our culture" (1981a: 193). If Freud's revisionism was hard to accept among his followers, this was in part because they were less free to fiddle with psychoanalysis than Freud was himself. As Freud's colleague, the Italian analyst Edoardo Weiss, put it: "We wonder how Freud would have reacted had another analyst reached these modified concepts before he did himself" (1970: 13).
Many analysts did not expect or appreciate that the sixty-three-year-old Freud, apparently bored during the war years, had single-handedly renovated the analytic kitchen. As Freud states in a letter of July 8, 1915, to his American supporter James Jackson Putnam: "I myself am using the break in my [clinical] work at this time to finish off a book containing a collection of twelve
psychological essays" (Freud 1960: 103). The changes in psychoanalytic doctrine came at a time when the old views had finally gained some currency amongst the paying public. By the 1920's psychoanalysis was internationally recognized, Freud himself was famous, and business was improving. Many of the early radicals of psychoanalysis—including an assortment of outsiders,
dilettantes, and social misfits—had been replaced by more conservative, even opportunistic, practitioners. It was with this lattermost thought in mind that Freud and his Viennese colleagues regularly questioned the motives of American doctors looking, so it seemed, for quick training that they would sell to the highest bidder back home. In the wake of the First World War, the

unstable European economy was not an ideal context for changing a winning business formula. Moreover, it was generally felt that the problems of sexuality were the primary business of a
psychoanalytic science—not death, which was traditionally the province of literature and philosophy.

The death drive is a ridiculous theory to justify irresponsibility and insensitivity—

proves the alt is a bad
Dufresne 2000 [Todd. Canadian social and cultural theorist best known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of
psychoanalysis. He is Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Tales from the Freudian Crypt:
the Death Drive in Text and Context. Stanford University Press, 2000. Pages 33-35.] // afre
Freud's contempt for, and insensitivity to, such human suffering was sometimes shocking, as Roazen amply demonstrates in Brother Animal. To Lou
Andreas-Salome, who was once Tausk's lover, Freud poured his venom: "I do not really miss him [Tausk]; I had long taken him to be useless, indeed a threat to the future" (in Roazen 1969: 140). Elsewhere Freud

writes, "Despite appreciation of his talent, [I have] no real sympathy in me" (Freud and Ferenczi 1996: 363).We find a pattern here. Sachs recounts a time when he observed Freud as
"the news came that someone with whom he had been on friendly terms for years had committed suicide. I found him 34 THE HETEROGENEOUS 'BEYOND' strangely unmoved by such a tragic event" (1945: 147). Clearly

Freud could be callous, if not cold-hearted . According to Sandor Rado, who was with Freud when the news of Karl Abraham's death came,"Freud's mourning was over after five
minutes" (in Roazen and Swerdloff 1995: 9o). In any case, Blumenberg seems to support Roazen's contention that Freud's theoretical formulation of a death drive was

really a way of denying responsibility for Tausk's suicide . He writes: "Of course the death instinct had its own logical force in the development and
completion of Freud's total myth; but the point in time, so close to a catastrophe [Tausk's suicide] in which Freud was involved in so many ways, may also have suited his need for consolation,

a need that the new dualism of the system of instincts could satisfy " (1985: 95). For Blumenberg, then, the "myth" of
psychoanalysis "becomes helpful to the survivor, as a means of exempting himself from traumatic
impact." Even more tantalizing is his suggestion that "the success of Freud's myths is the result of, among other things, the fact that they are the most complete guidelines to the formulation of excuses that have been
offered since Origen." The death drive became for Freud a repository into which he could dump everything that

didn't fit well in the categories of sexuality or libido . It was, in effect, a "rhetorical strategy," whereby blame
and responsibility could be assigned always elsewhere (Kerr 1993: soo). At the same time, cut off from any referent save itself, the death drive
became increasingly less autobiographical or biological; in short, it became efficient and silent, sublime and ridiculous. 12 It was, in short, a
principle without example (see Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 332). Take, for instance, the clinical viability of the death-drive
theory, the most scandalous instance being that of the "negative therapeutic reaction." According to this bit of remarkable double-think, a patient (or
rather, a part of the patient's ego) may be under the impress of an overly severe superego— the purveyor of the death

drive—and thus be singularly responsible for the failure of the therapy . "People in whom this unconscious sense of guilt is excessively strong
betray themselves in analytic treatment by the negative therapeutic reaction which is so disagreeable from the prognostic point of view" (1933a: 109). In other words, while blame, just like aggression, might theoretically fall on
one of two shoulders—analyst's or patient's—it was in practice dispensed to "bad" patients alone as the burden of an emotional and/or intellectual failure, weakness, or symptom. Or worse, it became a part of their biology, a

the death drive thus did away with the necessity for considering the
constitutional problem. As Wilhelm Reich quite properly complained,

sociological side of neurotic disorders: THE HETEROGENEOUS 'BEYOND' 35 Such formulations have made any further thinking unnecessary. If one was not able
to cure, the death instinct could be blamed . When people committed murder, it was in order to go to prison; when children stole, it was to obtain relief from a conscience that
troubled them. I marvel today at the energy that was expended at that time on the discussion of such opinions. (1952: 213) If resignation is at the bottom of the mystery of the new drive, the historian of psychology Daniel Burston

a confession of impotence in the face of the baffling complexities of mental illness " (1991: 199). If the devil is
adds that it was also "

Freud obviously finds a new place for him in his psychology: first in the Inferno
behind the bad conscience of the repentant Christian,

he called the unconscious, then in the death drive he called demonic, and finally in the superego he
called repressive and overly harsh. But in each case, and in any case, the devil was for Freud always on the side of the patient. And for one absolutely unimpeachable reason: Freud himself
couldn't have been in the wrong.

Freud is a pessimist – he was influenced by war and death – death drive was imply a
coping mechanism.
Dufresne 2000 [Todd. Canadian social and cultural theorist best known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of
psychoanalysis. He is Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Tales from the Freudian Crypt:
the Death Drive in Text and Context. Stanford University Press, 2000. Pages 15-17.] // afre
If I have already taken small steps away from theory proper by introducing the broad cultural-political-personal context within which psychoanalysis was produced and consumed, biographers
and historians have taken it much further down this sometimes provocative and almost always bumpy road. Certainly Freud's own far-reaching speculations have encouraged others, with

some justification, to do the same in their own work. As David Bakan puts it, "If a great man writes what appears to be nonsense, as Freud's writings on the death
instinct have sometimes been regarded even by psychoanalysts, it behooves us to look again to see what might lie underneath the
facade" (1966: 155; cf. Jones 1957: 278). It is rather significant, I think, that Freud's most speculative and abstract text is widely thought to have another, far more subjective, side. Yet this
is true of the entire Freudian corpus, which is deeply autobiographical. It is often forgotten, at times conveniently, by those who traffic exclusively in psychoanalytic theory, that Freud was
thinking of his dissidents Jung, Adler, Stekel, and Reich, among others—when he wrote on paranoia, the Schreber case, The Rat Man, the history of psychoanalysis, world prehistory and

Theorists with two hands in the philosophic pot

anthropology, civilization and its discontents, group psychology, interminable analyses, and so on.

have had difficulty paying adequate attention to what may seem the all too human, base considerations
of a biographical history; theorists tend to keep their hands clean of the messy details of everyday life, even as they shy away from clinical "discoveries" and "evidence."
Still, it is theoretically naive and a bit ironic when commentators of psychoanalysis ignore the
unbreakable continuity between Freud's work and his life or, more radically, between fantasy and
reality, autobiographical theory and biographical histories. Each side, if there are indeed discernable sides, inflects and disrupts the other. In
their varied attempts to fashion life histories from dry facts and dates, Freud biographers have often advanced a subjective interpretation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (see Jones 1957: 44;
Robert 1964: 323 -38) . Of paramount concern in this regard are the ominous events of the First World War, a time when the Freuds suffered privations at home and worried about their

war reinforced Freud's pessimistic view of mankind, which led directly to his
soldier-sons, Ernst and Martin. Certainly the

essays "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915) and "On Transience" (1916). In a letter to Fredrick van Eeden in late 1914, Freud openly laments the
pitiable state of human nature: I venture, under the impact of the war to remind you [that] . . . the
primitive savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any of its individual members. . . .
Our intellect is a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our instincts and affects. . . .You will
have to admit that psychoanalysis has been right in both its theses. (19151): 301-302 (appendix); see also Freud and
Andreas-Salome 1966: 21) During this same period, as Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1987: 77) suggests, Freud would engage in an "almost cheerful war

imagery" in his writing, especially in his personal correspondence. Freud wrote to Ferenczi on December 15, 1914, about his metapsychological efforts during that time:"I am
living, as my brother says, in my private trench; I speculate and write, and after hard battles have got safely through the first line of riddles and difficulties" (Freud and Ferenczi 1996: 36). But

however much Freud adapted to the new situation, it is likely, as both Bruno Bettelheim and Erich Fromm contend, that the war disturbed
Freud's attachment to the old Austro-Hungarian empire. Fromm even argues that the war "constitutes the dividing line within
the development of Freud's theory of aggressivity" (1973: 44o; cf. Burston 1991: 197). Freud began to write Beyond the Pleasure
Principle not long after the war, in March 1919, completing it by the middle of July 1920 and publishing it with the International Psychoanalytic Press by the end of the year.
In January 1920 Freud's friend, colleague, and key financial supporter Anton von Freund succumbed to cancer. Although Freund's death was expected, Freud writes that it was "for our cause, a

heavy loss, for me a keen pain, but one I could assimilate in the course of the last months" (in Gay 1988: 391). With this admission in mind, some suggest that Freud
"assimilated" the pain of Freund's illness and death into his new theories of that time . As Gay suggests of Freud, "work
was also a way of coping" with life's hardships (39o). Only a few days after Freund's death, on January 25, 1920, Freud's favored "Sunday child," Sophie Halberstadt, died of influenzal

pneumonia. To his friend, the Swiss pastor and lay analyst Oskar Pfister, Freud writes that Sophie's death was "a heavy narcissistic insult." During
Hilda Doolittle's (H.D.'s) analysis with Freud from 1932 to 1933, she recalled the Spanish influenza of 1920, which she, unlike Sophie, had managed to survive (and with child). Freud openly

Freud understandably
lamented to H.D. the loss of his daughter:" 'She is here,' he said, and he showed me a tiny locket that he wore, fastened to his watch-chain" (Doolittle 1974: 128).

thought it monstrous for a parent to outlive a child; years later he seemed relieved when his own mother finally died, thus clearing the

way for his own (guilt-free) death.

 scenario analysis good
Scenario analysis is inherently valuable—strengthens creativity, imagination, and
counters misconstrued cognitive biases
Barma 2016 [Naazneen, UC Berkeley political science PhD, “Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in
Political Science”, International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-20,
http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf]
// afre

the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship

Over the past decade, Prominent has been lamented by a growing chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009).

scholars of i affairs made the case for why political science research is
nternational have diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and policymaking,

valuable for policymaking , and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the policy relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci
2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several initiatives have been formed in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects focus on providing scholars with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the

implications of research to the policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for
findings and their

a field in which theoretical debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more
toward the abstract and esoteric . Yet enhancing communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between international affairs theory and practice. Another crucial component of this
bridge is the generation of substantive research programs that are actually policy relevant—a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline

numerous
with the explicit hope of informing policy. In a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection, strikingly little attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas for dissertation and other research topics. Although

articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and problem-based
learning especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes
, (Loggins 2009; Butcher 2012; Glasgow

problem-based approach to
2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas. This article outlines an experiential and

developing a political science research program using scenario analysis illuminates . It focuses especially on illuminating [ ] the research

pedagogical benefits
generation and which brings together doctoral of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC),

students of international and comparative affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-
relevant scholarship We argue that scenario
.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the technique in political science.

analysis should be viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly benefits of using scenarios to
help generate research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The third section reflects upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth section offers insights on the pedagogical
potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the importance of developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to generate political science scholarship of relevance to the policy world. What Are Scenarios and Why

Scenario analysis
Use Them in Political Science? can immerse decision makers in future is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It

states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage
of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks . The global petroleum company Shell, a

Scenario analysis is typically seen as serving the

pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. thus

purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision
making . Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis

Scenarios
We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds .” are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and

re depictions of
they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they a

possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and
potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures thus rely on explicit causal . Good scenarios

propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising
and sometimes controversial future worlds . For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States,
China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While
scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal

Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line
extrapolations of global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving
past business environment . Shell-style scenario planning
“helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots,
scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario
thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to

scenario analysis technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range

stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate , the

general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate
challenges . An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly
useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision
makers to imagine discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained
, let alone prepare for, by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-

cognitive bias tendencies

known scenarios help individuals break
such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of lies in their ability to

out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and
deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future Imagining alternative future worlds through a .

structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something
altogether different from the known present. The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-

Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how
relevant research programs.

the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy
challenges and opportunities . For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how
seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or
infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood

scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global
opportunities and threats,

politicaleconomic trends and dynamics . The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief

Scenarios offer an innovative tool for developing a political

often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. thus , in principle,

science research agenda . In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for
generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary,
some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then
exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal
claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the

scenario discussions lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases
themselves, as described below, .8 An

explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical
process around them The scenario
—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). use of s is similar to counterfactual analysis in

modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects
that it (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are

scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed

traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our

to explore potential futures that could unfold . As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political

forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising

actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while

intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained
historical knowledge . We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario
process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international

scenario analysis
affairs. The employs templates to serve as a graphical representation of a
process itself (discussed further below)

structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered
comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba

structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the
1994). Finally, this

scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas . The scenario process described here has thus been carefully
designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal
undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs
(Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for
example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these

scenarios
traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The

analyzed are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers

at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and

may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now .

This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events
analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction . In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass,

participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that
prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in
international affairs.
 Link turn
The 1AC’s exposure of lack combats the fantasy of security construction – that
accesses the alt.
McGowan 13 Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont. Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have: A Psychoanalytic Politics, University of Nebraska, 2013, pg. 43-46
While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subject’s own past, paranoia locates it in the other. Paranoia thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence. Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by side in
order to provide the subject a way of figuring its missing enjoyment. On its own, nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have limited political consequences. Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon, but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it involves the

subject's relation to itself rather than to an other. The same cannot be said for paranoia, which is why finding a way to counter paranoia represents an urgent political task. Paranoia is political in its very structure. It views the
other as a threat and produces hostility toward the other. The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two possible attitudes toward the other. According to the first, paranoia serves to explain the loss of the privileged
object. If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other, I see her/ his enjoyment coming at the expense of mine. The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine. The other, having stolen my enjoyment, bears responsibility for my existence as a subject of loss. This type of paranoia
removes the burden of loss from the subject and places it onto the other, and in addition it functions, like nostalgia, to convince the subject that having the object is a possibility. According to the second attitude, however, paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not
lost the privileged object. We are paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object but that it plans to do so. The imagined threat that the other poses reassures us that we have the ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets. By imagining a threat, we fantasize the
privileged object back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost. At first glance, it is difficult to see how paranoia might function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up. The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that has no tangible or definitive presence.

Everyone that this subject meets is a potential enemy in disguise threatening to steal or already
having stolen the subject's privileged object. In terms of the subject's own identity, paranoia does not provide security or stability. In fact, it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its
identity. But its appeal does not lie in how it transforms subjectivity; its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of meaning, its ability to be a guarantor that authorizes our social interaction. Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority.
There are authorities but no Authority, and a decisive Authority would be necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation, a sense that there is solid ground underneath their feet. Social proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position: one simply cannot believe
and obey every edict emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort. These contradictions occur on all levels of social pronouncements. One hears, for instance, about the dangers of eating too much fat, and then one hears about the cancer-preventing power of
chocolate. Parents tell their children not to fight and at the same time tell them to stand up for themselves. George W. Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel
dictator. Such inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily follow from the ultimate groundlessness of the social order itself. There is no final authority that calls all the shots in society and guarantees the consistency of the social order.
It is instead a structure in charge, and this structure functions through its very misfiring. The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social field of meaning - provides it with an openness to difference. If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch, it would have
no way of incorporating the subject into its fold. The subject invests itself in social authority precisely because this authority gives the subject contradictory demands. Faced with these incongruous imperatives, the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it.

The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the

Beneath the inconsistency, the desire of the authority remains a mystery.

social Other: the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other. A thoroughly consistent
social authority, while logically unthinkable, would not draw the desire of the subject in this way. It might force individuals into obedience, but it would not create the investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates. Confronting the inconsistency of social authority
is not an easy task for the subject. Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas. The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through their repression, and the result is some form of neurosis.

Another possibility is the paranoid reaction. Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem of the gap in authority, the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an other existing in this gap, an other behind the scenes pulling the strings. As Slavoj Zizek explains it,

" Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an 'Other of the Other ; into an Other who, hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and
thus guarantees its consistency: beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot." The comfort that paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this guarantee. For the paranoid subject, the surface inconsistency of
social authority hides an underlying consistency authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice. Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social authority. As

suspicion
with nostalgia, paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda. Its nourishes a nationalistic politic
of the other s and energizes the call for a return to traditional social arrangements. Just as

much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia, it fuels the contemporary war on terror. The exemplary right-wing political formation, Fascism, has its
basis in paranoia , seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens. The idea of an other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties, racism, police violence, and

A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime

so on. . Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism, leftists employ
paranoia to a vast extent, far more than they do nostalgia. Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left. It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative
energies, that the CIA assassinated Kennedy, and that major drug companies control the Food and Drug Administration, just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories. The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them.
The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations, but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority. For the paranoid subject, conspiracy theories don't simply explain a single event; they solve the problem of the
social order as such. According to this thought process, all loss stems from the conspiracy, which has derailed the social order and upset its balance. The paranoid subject cannot accept the necessity of loss, and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological. This
is evident in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy. Of course, Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed, but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy, an apotheosis that reveals what's
at stake in all paranoia. According to the film, had he remained in power, Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the United States the psychic wound that this war created. With Kennedy, one can imagine an American social order existing without
strife and loss. The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image, which testifies to the avoidability of loss." But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia. Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldn't identify. Among those who suffer from political oppression,
paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems. As Peter Knight points out, "Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and cultural
activism."38 When it directly produces activism, the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stone's film. In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. In
this work, Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality. The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs. Today, in order to think the
totality at all, subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy. As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the President’s Men, "The map of conspiracy itself .. . suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once."40 Jameson's
statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping, it also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left, especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan. The problem is that even

when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system, paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency . By eliminating the gap in social authority
and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show, paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects. The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority; it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of
meaning. The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself. Even if it manages tangible political victories, emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the

power of authority in the thinking of subjects and decreasing their freedom. What's more, it doesn't actually work. Like nostalgia, paranoia can never constitute a successful strategy for the
subject dealing with its fundamental condition. It will never provide the enjoyment that it promises the subject. Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate enjoyment but horrible disappointment. This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that

The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the
the hidden other has been vanquished.

threat, even though it imagines enjoyment with the threat's disappearance. an that would come Paranoia runs aground due to its failure to admit the
connection between enjoyment and loss. It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer. By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss, paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own
enjoyment.