Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter

Can’t Explain Politics

19.Their insistence on a dichotomy between ‘the individual,’ and ‘the collective,’ is counter-productive to analysis. Lacanian theory makes the necessary cut to avoid these criticisms.

It may be something else, however, to argue for the political relevance of Lacanian theory—that is, outside of the clinical context in which it was developed. Yet this theory avoids much of the criticism leveled against psychological and other kinds of psychoanalytic approaches to politics. Most such criticisms charge that it is reductionist to explain collective behavior in terms of the psychological characteristics of individuals. This is problematic since, as Mercer explains (2006: 297), using individual-level factors to ex- plain group-level factors reifies the group itself. Stavrakakis, in a discussion of the relevance psychoanalytic theory to politics, agrees that much of the skepticism toward these approaches is well founded. “There is no doubt,” he contends, “that psychological reductionism, that is to say the understanding of socio-political phenomena by reference to some sort of psychological substratum, an essence of the psyche, is something that should clearly be avoided (Stavrakakis 1999: I).

The approach developed here avoids such theoretical obstacles through the way in which it conceptualizes the relationship between the subject and the sociosymbolic order. Indeed, this approach does not make a strict distinction between “the individual” and the “collective” in the way that psychological approaches commonly do. For Lacan, the subject is unavoidably enmeshed with the social order. In his View (1981: 77, emphasis added), psychoanalytic theory “is governed by a particular aim, which is historically defined by the elaboration of the notion of the subject. It poses this notion in a new way, by leading the subject back to his signifying dependence.” The subject as such, in fact, is constituted by factors that are “outside” of it in the traditional sense of an “individual level” and a “collective level.” Moreover, when we pursue questions about desire, enjoyment, and discourse, such a dichotomy starts to break down.-’-9 Mercer argues that the solution to the levels-of-analysis problem in the study of identity is found in the under- standing that people have different identities at different levels of generalization; that “when people identify with a group, the group exists as part of the individual” (Hogg and Abrams 1988, cited in Mercer 2oo6: 297; see also Bloom r993).3° While this statement is true, this chapter has attempted to elaborate this complex claim. In this sense, the individual and the collective levels are not in fact different levels at all but can instead be viewed as inter- weaving and interdependent registers where no bright line is discernable between the subject and society.

The overlapping relationship between the subject and the Symbolic order allows us to bring in Ernesto Laclau’s relevance to this discussion. As noted earlier, Laclau’s approach to politics centers on the construction of hegemony, or the common sense of a society. When combined with his concepts of nodal points, equivalence, and difference, they offer a systematic accounting of how political frontiers are constructed and how hegemony is produced, maintained, and contested. For our purposes, there is fruitful overlap between nodal points (from Laclau) and master signifiers (Lacan) and between the logic of hegemony (Laclau) and the logic of the object a (Lacan). Lacan’s approach combines with Laclau’s emphasis on hegemonic politics to offer a way to analyze the politics of desire and subjectivity as the construction common sense powerfully underpinned by emotional investments of desire and enjoyment.