Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
Everyday practices of liberal democracies disprove psychoanalysis—reject their cherry-picking of examples
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
39.Everyday practices of liberal democracies disprove psychoanalysis—reject their cherry-picking of examplesRobinson ’04 (Andrew, Political Theorist and Activist, “The Politics of the Lack,” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 259–269, May, 2004) The articulation Stavrakakis performs is tenuous. An Act, a recognition of constitutive antagonism, is supposed to involve a recognition of the necessary incompleteness and the arbitrary basis of all symbolic and representational practices. In liberal democracy, however, one finds a strongly symbolic and representative system which generates more-or-less predictable outcomes. Elections are most often highly televisual affairs, and the emergence of patterns of voting behaviour and relatively stable systems of political parties refute the claim that elections suspend power in a moment in which everything is suddenly open. In any case, elections are themselves a fixed procedure which liberal democracy treats as unchallengeable and not at all arbitrary. The openness of electoral procedures at the level of content is supplemented by a closure at the level of form, and this closure ensures that the system never in fact calls its legitimacy into question. Stavrakakis himself terms democracy a ‘controlled contest with permanent rules’ (1999, 124), and the resultant omnipotence of those who write or ‘enforce’ the ‘rules’ is testament to the fallacy of the association of democracy with radical antagonism. The reduction of antagonism to a numerical procedure is hardly a ‘recognition’ of its existence beyond symbolisation, and when actual social relations overflow the counting process, ‘democracy’ cannot handle them. Far from constitutive antagonism, the antagonism recognised in liberal democracy is entirely ‘managed’ and symbolisable, being open to inscription in Swingometers and Hansard. The result is something closer to the ‘fantasmatic’ authoritarian model than Stavrakakis realises. The discourse of liberal philosophers and western politicians often invokes elements Stavrakakis would presumably label as ‘fantasmatic’, from the Rawlsian ‘well-ordered society’ to the ‘national interest’ and the Blairite ‘community’ (all targets, ironically enough, of Mouffe’s critiques). The possibility of non-fantasmatic democracy is asserted, not demonstrated. Furthermore, the excluded Real of liberal democracies is not so much the defeated electoral party— ’Her Majesty’s Opposition’—as the groups deemed too dangerous to be included in a democratic society: ‘extremists’, ‘troublemakers’, ‘terrorists’, ‘fundamentalists’, ‘yobs’, ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘criminals’ and so on. Opposite the Blairite community, for instance, are the ‘anti-social’, who are to be crushed with increasingly repressive legislation introduced under the pretexts offered by moral panics and scaremongering. In Stavrakakis’ text, the excluded others return in the form of ‘particularities’ which resist the demand for order and which he treats, in ‘fantasmatic’ fashion, as a threatening outside mounting ‘external threats’ (1999, 125–126). That the basis for this structural division is a desire for security rather than harmony makes little difference to its logic of inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, the kinds of exclusion common in democracies (directed against permanent minorities, immigrants, foreigners and disenfranchised groups) are nearly always beyond the remit of the representative system. The Laclauian case might carry more weight if the official opposition party, with a good chance of victory at the next election, was the Extremist Terrorist Troublemaker Party—and if its victory at the election really would be accepted by the defeated liberals and their Lacanian allies. In fact, democratic states are awash with undemocratic institutions coexisting with elected figureheads, and such states are quite compatible with strong asymmetries between governors and governed and between the nation state and its foreign/excluded others. One can question whether a liberal-democratic state could ever escape the ‘fantasmatic’ logic Stavrakakis rejects. The sense of integration produced by the state must, after all, be a fantasy, since it is based on an exclusion which belies the idea of integration. The resultant sense of security is equally illusory, if it exists at all. Living under the constant threat of state violence is hardly a recipe for overcoming anxiety, especially when everyday social relations owe very little to the integrating effects of ‘the political’. Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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