As part of the PIPOL activity, people in various countries and cities have rallied to the call to mobilise against the possibility of Marine Le Pen as president in France by writing. Today, of course, we know the result of the election, but even yesterday we were still waiting to hear whether France had followed the trend of UK and USA in lurching to the right. It is not the end of the struggle, of course, but at least there is more time to organise, speak out, write, and combat the waves of ignorance, fear and hate that continue to lap at the door.
Hate Thy Neighbour
The rise of the National Front in France and the entry
of the discourse of the far right into mainstream politics is something that
should concern us all.
We should not
allow ourselves to be deceived by Marine Le Pen´s attempts to present the friendly
face of fascism, going so far as to purge her own father from the party.
We psychoanalysts
above all should be aware that the elimination of the father serves as a
fundamental pivot for the transmission of a culture. But just what kind of
culture is being promised to us here?
Have we forgotten
that almost half a century ago Lacan was already situating the problematic of
segregation as “the mark, the scar, left by the father´s disappearance”? How then are we to ensure
that we do not find ourselves sliding from the father to worse?
Recent events in
America, England and other countries across Europe show that there is no room
for complacency here. Although the circumstances may differ in various
countries, what we are witnessing is a combination of populism, nationalism and
xenophobia becoming the new norm of political discourse.
The result of the
Brexit referendum provides ample evidence of the attraction of the appeal to
nationalist and populist sentiments, the reactionary nostalgia for symbols of
national sovereignty and tradition in a country that has still not come to
terms with the decline of its once proud empire and its diminished place in the
world.
But we should not
overlook the key role played in the outcome of that referendum of an almost
visceral response of repudiation and rejection, an overwhelming sense of fear
and helplessness in the face of the unfolding refugee crisis in Europe, the
prospect of a wave of undifferentiated immigration coming out of Syria and other
areas of political and social breakdown in Africa and the Middle East.
The same island
geography that underpinned the rise of Britain´s Empire off the back of naval
power facilitates the seductive idea of shutting down our borders, cutting
ourselves off from mainland Europe, turning our backs of the challenges of social,
political and economic integration that it represents, and taking refuge in
diffuse and ill-defined notions of national identity.
The vacuity of
perhaps the most effective slogan of the Brexit campaign - “Take back control” -
allowed it to stand proxy for the question of immigration. In response to
Angela Merkel´s open hearted but politically naïve reaffirmation of the “open
borders” policy of the European Union, the promise of being able to take back
control of our national borders was able to over-ride any appeals to economic
self-interest.
Amongst other
concerns in the wake of the referendum there is one issue that has perhaps not
received the media coverage that it warrants. This is the alarming rise in
so-called “hate crimes” (in some areas up 100%) since the referendum, a
proliferation of attacks on foreigners, immigrants, minorities, anyone bearing
a perceived trace of difference.
It is here that
we perceive most clearly the disjunction between the empty rhetoric of national
sovereignty and the cold reality of daily attacks in the street, serving as the
outlet for a mindless violence, brutality and hatred that has been given new
legitimacy by the outcome of the referendum.
What then can we
contribute on these matters, especially those of us who look on with concern
but have no direct part to play in the forthcoming French elections? The fact
that we have no vote in this matter does not mean that we have nothing to say.
In the first
instance, each one of us, as subjects and citizens, can be as articulate as
possible about where we stand on these matters. But in our capacity as
psychoanalysts we can seek to go beyond simple condemnation and moral outrage,
attempting to account for something of the perverse attraction of the positions
we condemn, the emotional logic that makes each one of us vulnerable, to one
degree or another, to the seductive whispers of hatred and intolerance.
If nothing else,
our experience as analysands can teach us something about the status of the
subject, which as Jacques-Alain Miller long ago taught us, is by definition an
immigrant, born of the signifiers of the Other, alienated from the country of
its birth, and always to some extent an exile, a refugee from a jouissance to
which we are never quite reconciled and about which we ultimately wish to know
nothing.
But it is above
all our experience of occupying the position of object in the clinic,
incarnating the position of reject, refuse of discourse and of jouissance, that
provides a unique platform for reading the co-ordinates of the libidinal logic
at play in current political developments.
It is on this
basis that already in the 1920s Freud was reading the rise of populism in
Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. His great text from 1921, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
devoted to the logic of mass phenomena, remains today one of our fundamental
references.
In this text
Freud explores the libidinal and emotional factors at play in the formation of
groups in the light of the psychic mechanisms of hypnosis and suggestion. His
examination of the role of the leader in the formation of the group allowed him
to situate the question of identification at the heart of group formations.
He demonstrated
that it is the identification with the leader, not just as bearer of the insignias
of prestige and the promise of an equal love for all, but also as standing in
the place of the murdered father of the primal horde, that is the pivot for the
horizontal identifications between members that make up the cohesion of any
group.
Situating the
leader in his or her position as substitute for the dead father allowed Freud
to consider the other factors that can take the place of the leader in carrying
out the same function as point of reference for the unifying tendencies of the
group, asking whether “a common tendency, a wish in which a number of people
can have a share, may not in the same way serve as a substitute”.
Crucially, Freud
even highlighted here that a negative tendency of repulsion, rejection or
hatred can play just the same unifying role in group formation as one of
positive attraction. “The leader or the leading idea might also (…) be
negative; hatred against a particular person or institution might operate in
just the same unifying way, and might call up the same kind of emotional ties
as positive attachment.”
The Freudian
problematic of the articulation between vertical and horizontal identifications
in the group continues to provide us with a minimal but flexible framework for
examining the interaction between nationalism and populism in contemporary
politics. One of the more pressing issues today then becomes that of exploring
the hybrid mutations of the articulation between these two axes in the era of
accelerated decline of patriarchal authority and legitimacy.
Once again it is
the work of Lacan that provides us with the most reliable guide in addressing
these questions. His linguistic formalization of the Freudian Oedipus Complex allowed
him to reduce the question of identification with the leader to the logic of
subjective identifications with the master signifier. At the same time his
conceptualisation of the object a as
residue of jouissance not reducible to the signifier, allowed him to locate
more precisely the disturbing element at the heart of subjective identity and
at the root of what Freud had called the discontents of civilization.
It is the
articulation between the master signifier and the object a that provides us with the framework for exploring the effects of
segregation that we witness increasingly as the inexorable counterpart to the
contemporary politics of identification. The more conditions of group coherence
are indexed on appeals to national identity, the more aggravated are the
corollary tendencies towards the elimination of disruptive residues and any heterogeneous
traces of difference.
It is this logic
that enables us to grasp the degree to which the cremation of the Jews (Papa Le
Pen´s “detail of history”) was in fact an integral corollary of the quest for
Aryan purity and adherence to symbols of national identity.
It was above all
in the decade following his expulsion from the IPA, finding himself the object
of excommunication by the discourse of orthodoxy, that Lacan continued to
refine and question the status of object
a and the logic of segregation that it entails. His charting of the rise
of the object to the social zenith in place of the master signifier allowed him
to expose the converse logic that promised the rise of ever more extreme forms
of segregation played out in the real, as predicted in his words from the Proposition of 1967:
“Let me summarise
by saying that what we have seen emerge from this, to our horror, represents the
reaction of precursors in relation to what will unfold as a consequence of the
rearranging of social groupings by science and, notably, of the
universalisation science introduces into them. Our future as common markets
will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line extension of the process of
segregation.”
According to this
revised logic, xenophobia, racism and segregation are not simply secondary
byproducts of the mechanisms at play in globalization and national unification.
Rather the later Lacan was able to demonstrate that signifying identifications
are in fact predicated on a primary act of rejection of an inassimilable
jouissance at the level of the drive.
This is the logic
that is elaborated by Eric Laurent in his indispensible text entitled Racism 2.0. “The founding crime is not
the murder of the father but the will to murder he who embodies the jouissance
that I reject.” Identification with the signifier fails to resolve the question
of jouissance not simply because the signifier never entirely covers the field
of jouissance, always leaving an inassimilable and destabilizing residue, but
more profoundly because of a fundamental and irremediable disjunction at the
heart of the articulation between signifier and jouissance.
The fragility and
instability of identifications, whether at the subjective or national level,
are thus indexed on a fundamental void in the knowledge of jouissance that
inhabits us, “a fundamental not-knowing with respect to the jouissance that
would correspond to identification.” Because “we have no knowledge of the
jouissance from which we might take our orientation”, and because we can no
longer rely on the symbolic co-ordinates of the Other to provide our reference,
“we only know how to reject the jouissance of others”.
Eric Laurent
traces out the consequences of this logic of segregative identifications
founded not simply on a rejection of jouissance but also and more
problematically on a complementary denial of human identity to the one whose
jouissance I reject. “He who I reject for having a jouissance distinct from
mine is not a man.”
It is clear that
this logic opens the door to all kinds of barbarities, perpetrated precisely in
the name of national identity, against those who come to embody the jouissance
that I reject in myself. It also exposes the vacuity of all the secondary
rationalizations invoked to justify our discrimination as well as the fundamental
duplicity of the identifications built upon this rejection. “The malicious
jouissance at stake in racist discourse is the failure to recognize this
logic.”
To conclude we
can perhaps return to another key reference on these questions, the session
devoted to racism in Jacques-Alain Miller´s course from 1985-86 on Extimacy,
recently published in The Lacanian Review
under the title “Extimate Enemies”. In this text, Jacques-Alain
Miller explains why recourse to liberal ideals of universal humanism fails to
resolve the issues at stake in racism and segregation:
“This humanism
becomes completely disoriented when the real of the Other manifests itself.”
Appeals to the rights of man or a sense of our common humanity fail to resolve
the question “because the universal mode (…) encounters its limits in the
strictly particular. It encounters its limits in what is neither universal nor
universalisable, in what we call with Lacan the mode of jouissance.”
It is here that
Miller situates the “remainder that one could call the obscure causes of
racism, against which indignation is perhaps not enough”. He then goes on to
indicate the questions that arise at this point, the consequences of which we
are still exploring at a theoretical, social and political level:
“Putting the
hatred of the Other in question is not sufficient, since this would precisely
raise the question of knowing why this Other is Other. (…) The hatred of the
Other is something more than aggressiveness. In this aggressiveness there is a
constant that merits the name of hatred, the hatred that aims at the real in
the Other. (…) What is it that makes this Other so Other that one can hate it
in its very being? It is the hatred of the jouissance of the Other. This is the
most general form of modern racism that we witness. It is the hatred of the
particular way in which the Other enjoys. (…)
“You are willing
to recognize your neighbour as Other as long as he does not live next door to
you. You are willing to love your neighbour as yourself, but above all when he
is at a distance, separated from you. When this Other gets a bit closer, one
has to be an optimist (…) to believe that this produces an effect of
solidarity, to believe that this leads straight away to mutual recognition. (…)
When the Other gets a little too close, new fantasies appear that are
especially concerned with the excess of the jouissance in the Other. (…)
“The essence of
the matter is that the Other is unfairly subtracting from you a certain part of
your jouissance. That is the constant. The question of tolerance or intolerance
(…) has to be situated at another level, which is that of the tolerance or
intolerance of the jouissance of the Other – of that Other inasmuch as this
Other is fundamentally the one who is robbing me of my jouissance.
“For our part, we
know that the fundamental status of the object is to have always been stolen by
the Other. We write this theft of jouissance minus phi, the matheme of
castration. If the problem appears unsolvable, it is because the Other is Other
in my interior. The root of racism is the hatred of one´s own jouissance. There
is no other – if the Other is in my interior in a position of extimacy, it is
also hatred of myself.”
Here we find
ourselves at the heart of the logic that drives the discourse of hatred and
segregation. It is up to each one of us, one by one, to grasp the way this
logic plays itself out in our own experience and to trace out its consequences
for an ethics and a politics based in a reading of the logic at stake in
contemporary events and the future that is being promised to us.
