93 (Traced from SWERVE) — Mathieu Claude-Giroux, 27th October 2024

The Lacking Subject of Populist Enjoyment: A Lacanian and Marxian reading of ‘people’ oriented politics as a perverse symptom of technocratic capitalism

Introduction

Contemporary capitalist infrastructure is increasingly cybernetic, morphing into an autoregulating positive feedback loop that depends upon the progress of techno-science to maintain its dominance. This logic as Jürgen Habermas already remarked in the 1968 text Technology and Science as “Ideology” leads to a growing specialization within the administration of the social whole¹. The Frankfurt School theorist suggests that techno-scientific progress subjugated to capitalist growth highlights that the social structure is increasingly non-human as rationality becomes the language of machines outside of direct human control. Interestingly enough however, the ‘becoming-machine’ of capitalism and its administration seems to lead to a ‘becoming-animal’ of the masses who fall under the charm of explicitly anti-technocratic, anti-intellectual, and sometimes even anti-scientific (as seen during the pandemic) obscene populism, which Habermas could not identify in his 1968 text. The global neoliberal techno-scientific order seems under the threat of the growing worldwide popularity of an anti-technocratic nationalist right. This seemingly paradoxical reality is explained when we take into consideration that the rationalization of capitalist production and its administration does not depend upon the physical and psychic well-being of the masses but upon the logic of capitalist accumulation.
Sigmund Freud noted that just as the ontogenetic development of the subject’s psyche evolves from the magical thoughts of childhood to the rationality of adulthood, the phylogenetic development of civilization evolves from esoteric organization to rational organization². But Freud, unlike Habermas, perhaps ignored the degree to which the rationalization of civilizational organization would be materialized in non-human cyber-systems. This deconstructs the linear enlightenment process that one could impose upon the metanarrative. As rationality escapes the grasp of humanity and autoregulates the flux of capital, it increasingly seems to be libido that serves as the fuel of the infrastructure, underlying the utmost importance of theoretical libidinal materialism. The libidinally perverse reality of capitalism gives rise to the symptom of populist obscenity which reacts with aggression towards alienation from the technocratic social sphere.
In this article, I refer to populism as a political discourse that interpellates subjects experiencing social malaise in regards to technocratic capitalism through the creation of an antagonism between the master signifier ‘people’ and the ‘outsider’ signifier in which the ‘people’ are a substantialized fetish of lost social harmony.
The populist agent profits from the dialectical ‘becoming’ of the social sphere by interpellating the libidinal malaise in service of the movement of capital through transgressive discourse. The populist agent presents themself as a subversive political actor who transgresses the status quo while ignoring the contradictions of the economic infrastructure, they promise a capitalism without contradictions. This is why I conceptualize populism as a perverse symptom of capitalism presented as a Universal.

Père-version

What do we mean by ‘perverse’? Then French structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan views perversion as the subject’s struggle against their castration through identification with the imaginary phallus (defined as “the signifier of the signified in general”)³. This means that in contrast to the neurotic subject who simply bends to the order of the primal father’s Law, the perverse subject finds a sense of enjoyment (jouissance) in their gaze upon the primal father’s use of his phallic signifier: they identify with the Name-of-the-Father’s enjoyment. As Freud suggests in his analysis of hierarchical dynamics in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the leader signifies the father who has undisputed access to sexual enjoyment within the tribe, to which the subordinated subject identifies perversely⁴. In this sense, the subject obeying populist discourse is convinced that they are transgressing the Oedipal territorialities of the technocratic capitalist Other while falling victim to the libidinal and political demands of the same infrastructure that the Other defends. Isn't the January 6th insurrection, penetration of the technocratic signifier that is the American congress, the perfect perverse metaphor of the populist disciples finding enjoyment through identification with the father’s (Trump) transgressing phallic signifier?

Populist enjoyment

Populism is a clear example of the superego as a political variable in our contemporary era. This is another point in which I depart from Habermas as he believed that techno-scientific ideology would “destructure” the superego. However, I do not simply conceptualize Freud’s concept of the superego as an internalization of social moral imperatives which cause the subject to repress their libidinal urges, but as a libidinal enjoyment in the Other’s discourse. As Lacan notes in his twentieth seminar, the superego orders the subject: “ Jouis!” (Enjoy !)⁵. The superego is thus not a repressive force that negates the id, but a channeling force that gives a sense of enjoyment to the subject through identification with the Name-of-the-Father’s enjoyment. It is here that Lacan’s use of the expression ‘père-version’ (father version) to speak of perversion finds its theoretical pertinence. A populist agent dictates the libidinal investments of their followers through obscene transgressions of the political symbolic order (by using vulgar language or throwing personal attacks at political opponents for example). Since the technocratic nature of the political sphere is alien to the subject, their aggression is driven against the supposed destruction of this order. Nonetheless, I must note that it is the semiotic obscenity of the populist agent that gathers support among the masses. The liberal technocrat seems baffled when confronted with this phenomenon, unable to comprehend why the populist agent’s obscene discourse does not discredit them as a political figure. It is not in spite, but because of his perverse obscenity that Trump creates enjoyment among his followers, giving off the impression that he is transgressing the symbolic limits of American political discourse. We can also use the psychoanalytic reading of political perversion to theorize the failure of Ron DeSantis, who despite trying to imitate Trump's rhetoric, was unable to embody his obscene transgression. By presenting himself as a ‘professional’ Trump, DeSantis was doomed to dissatisfy the populist enjoyment. Populism is a revolt against the primal Father’s Law through identification with his monopoly on enjoyment: DeSantis does not enjoy. A subject supports populism as it sells a revival of enjoyment in an ever-growing technoscientific and global alienating infrastructure of capital.
Populist enjoyment is further interpellated when the subject feels as if it is repressed by the status quo, feeding the justification for symbolic transgression. A toddler tries to test the limits of their parent’s authority through the conscious transgression of the ‘Law’ (symbolic order imposed by the parents), oftentimes while directly staring into the parent’s eyes. Through punishment following the transgression, the toddler is confirmed individuality and control over the parental figure. When the populist agent is repressed by the Other, they feel as if they exert control over the alien that is the social sphere, creating a sense of enjoyment. As it confirms the need for transgression of the technocratic symbolic order, Trump’s indictments only feed populist enjoyment as shown by the 52.8 million dollars that his 2024 presidential campaign raised in the 24 hours following the guilty verdict that he received concerning hush money. This enjoyment through repression can be linked to Freud’s revolutionary 1920 speculative essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he notes through the theoretical construction of the ‘death drive’ that it is the repetition of the failure to possess the object of desire that provides enjoyment to the subject.⁶ Every time the populist disciple suffers a loss in their fight against the technocratic social sphere, they feel enjoyment as their hardship nourishes their object of desire: a non-alienated existence. The populist fantasy forms in the psychic apparatus of the subject as a sublime enjoyment that results from sacrifice and loss. Enjoyment is always pleasure taken to its self-destructive limits which underlies the dialectic of pleasure and pain, of Eros and Thanatos. Enjoyment is a menace for the social sphere as it is always excessive, going beyond the pleasure principle, a surplus of excitation if I may, whereas pleasure, as Freud defines it, strives for the elimination of excess excitation⁷. Objects as such do not interpellate desiring subjects. It is through sacrifice and self-repression that subjects lend desiring mysticism to objects. In this sense, it is through repeated loss that the populists situate themselves with the fantasy of a social whole that has gotten rid of the ‘outsider’ signifier: technocracy and the false enemies of the whole targeted by the populist leader (immigrant, leftist, feminist, LGBTQ+ community, etc…). The populist’s masochistic attitude is a symptom of the growing alienation and disorientation of subjects regarding the social sphere. Masochism is a product of a lack of recognition from the Other. Take adolescents, who engage in self-destructive behavior to create a sense of control over themselves as they wrestle with a strong feeling of disorientation and the unpredictability of social demands. Rather than be surprised by the unpredictable pain inflicted by the Other, subjects prefer to self-destruct predictably. The populist’s desire for repression by both their political leader and the technocratic social sphere is thus symptomatic of a society that seems to transform without the subject’s well-being being considered in the equation, creating a deep sentiment of alienation. Obscenity and transgression are a masochistic way of forcing the Other’s gaze to recognize the populist subject. The subjects that have been abandoned and tossed away by the liberal technocratic gaze impose themselves upon the social sphere via their perversion. This perverse obscenity haunts the liberal technocrat without realizing that populism is the direct product of the contradictions of a techno-scientific capitalist infrastructure: the ‘return of the repressed’. Only the repressed is in this case necessary for the capitalist economy as it channels libidinal malaise in a non-class-based political project. When faced with the rise of populist obscenity, liberal technocrats seem to comfort themselves by denouncing the anti-technocratic movement as a pure incarnation of stupidity, an anti-symptomatic reaction that has as its goal to preserve the concept of the liberal totality as a non-contradictory Universal in which undermining particularities are nothing but ‘mistakes’.

The phallic object of populism

Lacan’s structuralist reading of Freud’s Oedipus complex helps us illustrate the socio-libidinal dynamics of populism. In the metaphor put forward by Lacan, the child going through the Oedipal process is first introduced to the ‘Desire-for-the-Mother’ signifier associated with the satisfaction brought by the mother’s breast, a substantial object of fulfillment. The lack of the mother’s breast is the child’s first confrontation with psychic frustration which will later define subjectivity as embedded with a lack of an imaginary object (‘object a’). Following this step, the child ‘recognizes’ the mother’s lack of a symbolic object (the phallic signifier). From this recognition comes conflict with the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ signifier whom the child sees as the possessor of non-castrated fulfillment able to put an end to the mother’s lack, the Oedipal triangle in which there is love for the mother and hatred towards the father is birthed. To resolve the Oedipus complex, the child must recognize their lacking condition as castrated subjects faced with the father’s imaginary phallic possession and internalize the ‘Name-of-the-Father’s’ Law while identifying with it.⁸ The populist agent is conceptualized in the gaze of the disciple as being a non-castrated phallic signifier with which identification brings satisfaction as the disciple recognizes their castration. Nonetheless, the agent’s phallus is imaginary, as even the charismatic populist political actor is lacking, which the disciples do not recognize. As Lacan famously notes: “There is no Big Other”.⁹ Full Oedipal satisfaction and the possession of the object of desire is thus impossible as neither the subject nor the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ have the phallus.

The ‘people’-supposed-to-know

The responsibility embodied by the populist agent towards the subject is similar to that of the psychoanalyst towards the psychoanalyzed. On the one hand, the patient undergoing psychoanalysis, attaches symbolic importance to the psychoanalyst, believing that the latter will provide the answer to their distress. The psychoanalyst is, as Lacan puts it, the ‘subject-supposed-to-know’.¹⁰ However, the psychoanalyst's task is simply to elevate the mechanisms of the patient's unconscious into the realm of discourse, to make the subject aware of their unconscious machinery. Even so, the unconscious is not a chest full of secrets about the psyche, but rather the embodiment of psychic desires and conflicts via symptoms. On the other hand, the populist agent does not simply manipulate the desires of castrated subjects - they are castrated subjects themselves - but elevates the corrupted Oedipal desires of their loyalists into political discourse. It is through the symbol of authority that the subject affirms their unconscious desires in the socio-semiotic sphere. But, if nonetheless, one of the three ideals of the psychoanalytic cure is authenticity as Jacques Lacan remarks in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis seminar, placing value upon the subject going through analysis’s honesty regarding even their most deranged desires and dreams¹¹, it would be vulgar for the analyst to simply encourage those desires and their incarnation in the social sphere. This is however what the populist agent does regarding their follower’s desires, legitimizing and encouraging the political incarnation of unconscious desires symptomatic of an alienating social totality. In this sense, populist political agents recognize a psychic malaise that is repressed by technocratic liberal discourse but mobilize this malaise in a vulgar fetishistic manner.

The necrophilic object of populist desire

Across the globe, populist discourse mobilizes nostalgia for a lost social whole as a political strategy. In the United States with Trump’s famous “ Make America Great Again” to Turkey with the AKP party’s “ Resurrection once again, rise once again ” (Yeniden diriliş, yeniden yükseliş), populist agents promote a fantasy for their disciples through the symbolic creation of a signifier of lost social harmony or greatness which once supposedly defined their nation. Populism promises to return to the glory that once defined the nation by giving power back to the authentic ‘people’ (an incredibly confused and problematic signifier) of the nation and away from the ‘outsiders’ (another confused signifier) as exemplified by Trump during his 2017 presidential inauguration speech: “ For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs, and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes, starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment --- it belongs to you. It belongs to everyone gathered here today, and everyone watching, all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration, and this, the United States of America, is your country.”¹² Populist nostalgic discourse can be scrutinized with a Lacanian lens when we take into account the nostalgic essence embedded within our desiring condition. Lacan illustrates that desire is always necrophilic, it aims at a lost object (‘object a’) which is a fantasy of a harmonious non-lacking psychic and desiring past. Populism, like Christianity, situates itself libidinally with a harmonious and glorious original condition (the Garden of Eden) and promises the resurrection of this original glorious condition (the kingdom of Heaven) through devotion to a paternalistic dogma. However, Lacan is clear that the ‘object a’ is not a real lacking object that the subject once possessed, but an object that disappears as soon as it emerges. It defines subjectivity as such, the subject is always castrated¹³. A Lacanian analytic framework thus pushes us to be critical of libidinal nostalgia just as Lacan himself was critical in his seventh seminar of the libertine myth of a non-castrated subjectivity associated with the free ‘primitive’ pushed by naturalist intellectuals¹⁴. Castration is for psychoanalysis the apriori of subjectivity, there is never an authentic sense of ‘oneness’ that can be achieved through the possession of an object of desire. However, to situate oneself libidinally about various metonymic incarnations of the ‘object a’ (like the reincarnation of ‘oneness’ through populism) permits the subject to find satisfaction in their struggle to obtain the non-existent object of desire. The Christian for example can find pleasure in their life’s material hardship through their relation with an afterlife of ‘oneness’. Populist nostalgia thus mobilizes the myth of a non-castrated past by interpellating desire’s necrophilic condition in the service of the populist political movement.

Populism and fetishism

In feudalism, Oedipal triangulations were easily identifiable considering the top-down arborescent political, religious, economic, and libidinal structures that composed it; in capitalism, the market has seemingly schizophrenized repression. If the obstacle to one’s enjoyment was once clearly identified through a series of paternal figures, it is no longer the case. But even suffering in feudal times was situated in relation to the cathartic jouissance of one’s reincarnation in the afterlife. The question one must ask concerning the social whole is no longer “Who controls the system ?”, but “What controls the system?” considering the machine-like logic of capital and its use of non-human cyber-rational systems. In the first volume of Capital, Marx notes that in medieval times “Personal dependence characterizes the social relations of material production as much as it does the other spheres of life based on that production.”¹⁵. In such a mode of production, the social fetishes are placed upon the individuals profiting from the peasantry’s labor time and the religious signifiers of the superstructure rather than on commodities. When the collective fetishes are ‘substituted’ by commodities, the structural relations of production gain mastery of the subjects without a top-down social dynamic to be identified. The contradictions of capitalism are hidden by the dominant discourse, capital’s exploitative logic is absent from the dominant analytic lens, seeing capital as a non-dialectical thing-in-itself, rather than the result of the exploitation of labor-time, camouflaging furthermore the social malaise. When faced with the alienating malaise symptomatic of capitalist contradictions, the subject wishes to identify the root causes of this psychic suffering. However, as class-based political actors are nowhere to be found to transform the subject in itself into a subject for itself through class struggle, the populist agent profits from the subject’s malaise. The populist leader constructs and targets a series of enemies who are seen as being outside of an otherwise harmonious social whole and wishes for the elimination of these targets who fill in the void where there were once fetishized individuals within the productive process. These targets more than often include the technocratic political elite, minorities, and immigrants. As the dialectical materialist and Lacanian thinker Slavoj Zizek puts it: “ …populist discourse displaces antagonism and constructs the enemy. In populism, the enemy is externalized or reified into a positive ontological entity (even if this entity is spectral) whose annihilation would restore balance and justice….”¹⁶ The fetishism of particular identities which supposedly deconstruct the social whole’s harmony reveals why Freud considered fetishism to be both neurotic and psychotic¹⁷; neurotic in the sense that the subject believes that Other has clear non-contradictory demands represented by the fetishized enemies; and psychotic in the sense that the mystical aura placed upon the particularities necessitate a rejection of capitalist reality. I nonetheless view fetishism, like Lacan, as being in the realm of symbolic relations and language and not like Freud purely in sexual terms. Considering the death-driven perverse nature of populism and the lack of the desiring subject, a populist movement can never claim victory over the constructed enemy for the social malaise finds its roots beyond the particularity of the fetishized enemy. The Lacanian death drive aims for the lost object of desire which would supposedly fill the lack intrinsic in the subject’s desiring condition without ever attaining it, the drive ‘circles around’ the object of desire¹⁸. The subject finds satisfaction as noted previously in the repeated failure to attain the object of desire. Therefore, even when populism is in power, it must continually affirm the struggle against the particular enemy to justify the lack of non-castration amongst its followers. Trump for example can never affirm full victory against migrants, the elites, antifa, and so on as it would break the libidinal logic of his popularity. “Encore !”( Again! ), commands desire¹⁹.
Lacan famously criticized the signifier ‘woman’, pronouncing “Il n’y a pas La femme”²⁰ (There is not The woman) to demonstrate that the ‘oneness’ associated with the signifier was situated in the realm of the ‘Imaginary’. Woman as a singular totalizing category does not exist, woman is multiple, but fetishized into existence as singular by man’s desire, the signified object of desire of male subjectivity. Using this theoretical exploration, I declare that ‘The People do not exist’. The ‘people’ signifier that orientates political populism is the discursive incarnation of the castrated subject of populism’s non-castrated ‘Ideal-ego’ of substantial ‘oneness’ which rejects the ‘outsiders’ of the social sphere. However, just as ‘Woman’ is the totalizing fetish of a plural, ‘people’ is an empty signifier that attempts to interpellate the narcissistic self-identity of a non-existing authentic particular political agent. There is no substantial content other than an empty fetish being evoked by the ‘people’ signifier. It assumes homogeneity amongst the non-outsiders where there are clear heterogeneous interests and conflicts, notably class conflict. What constitutes the pure ‘people’ of populist enjoyment is not a series of similarities amongst particular interests or an alienated subjectivity in regards to the mode of production, but a rejection of the ‘outsider’. As Barret Weber notes in Laclau and Žižek On Democracy and Populist Reason, “The movement basically knows who and what it is because it knows what it is not – that is, the enemy.”²¹ An American worker whose job was exported overseas due to capitalist globalization is able to identify with the same ‘people’ signifier as Trump, the personification of vulgar bourgeois enjoyment through the exclusion of an ‘outsider’, the constructed enemy of populist discourse.
The misidentification of the whole’s enemies by subjects in search of a primal father at the roots of social malaise precedes the rise of the populist agent, but as the agent is a subject-supposed-to-know, they legitimize the subject’s misidentification in the socio-semiotic sphere. Lacan notes that at the beginning of a psychoanalytic cure, the subject-supposed-to-know is not only the identity the analyzed imposes upon the analyst but also the identity the analyst imposes upon the analyzed²². The analyst must equally assume that the analyzed understands the cause behind their presence on the couch which justifies the analytic interpretation. I link this to the populist affirmation of the libidinal confusion of the masses when the ‘enemy’ is hard to identify and therefore displaced upon external particularities.

Populism as a symptom

The logic of populism is one in which an external enemy is essentialized and seen as being purely a pathology infecting an otherwise harmonious whole. Psychoanalysis does not obey this logic (except for its revisionist ‘ego psychology’ forms), understanding that the psyche is a constant dialectical struggle between subject and structure in which pathological symptoms emerge as products of the whole rather than the particular in the same way that Hegelian/Marxian logic understands the particular within the social whole as the product of the contradictions of the Absolute. Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, defends that it is through the examination of the object of its study in crises that we can understand the functioning of this object in a ‘normal’ state in contrast to contemporary psychiatry and populism which wish to repress pathological symptoms of the objects without a comprehension of the dialectical whole. Capital Volume I severely critiques the political economists unable to understand the social nature that gives rise to commodity fetishism and psychoanalysis critiques the crude pathologization and repression of deviance. I am here not creating this link between Hegelianism/Marxism and psychoanalysis out of thin air as even Jacques Lacan underlies the fact that Marx invented the symptom²³. I thus think of Marx, in a way, as a psychoanalyst of the social whole, uncovering the unconscious dynamics of capitalism through the analysis of its symptoms. A dialectical approach to the social totality is necessarily opposed to the essentializing logic of populism as it desubstantializes the particularities of the Absolute, that which populism is unable to do. By ‘symptom’ uniting Freud and Marx, as Zizek suggests in his acclaimed book The Sublime Object of Ideology, I am referring to a particularity that undermines the basis of an ideological Universal. For example, in a social order in which liberalism is held as a Universal, promoting individual liberty as an ideal, workers still have to be subjects of capitalist exploitation. This unfreedom necessary for the Universal of liberal freedom is a symptom of liberalism²⁴. Having this in mind, we must then recognize that Habermas’s illustration of techno-science as an ideology does not consider the symptom. It establishes technocratic society as a Universal without conceptualizing the particularities that emerge from the contradictions of that said Universal which Marx considers to be utopian. Populist obscenity must be theorized as the libidinal and political symptom that undermines the basis of the techno-scientific Universal when we recognize that the ‘becoming-machine’ of the social whole’s administration undermines itself through a ‘becoming-animal’ of libidinally motivated political discourse as alienation from the totality’s capitalist process grows among the masses.

Conclusion

As the specters of Fukuyama’s End of History have seemingly gained mastery over our collective imaginary, imposing a sense of defeatism and melancholia among radical thinkers and political actors, the theorization of particularities menacing the technocratic liberal order presented as a Universal are denounced by the discursive agents of that Universal as pure pathologies, unable to grasp the structural dynamics at play giving rise to those deviant particularities. The task of libidinal materialism must thus be to dialectically analyze the psychic and social symptoms undermining the hegemony of the technocratic liberal Universal. Dialectical thought gives us the tools to comprehend that the psychic and social reality of populist enjoyment is not simply an exterior antithesis to the technocratic liberal Universal, but the incarnations of the contradictions of that Universal as it is affirmed. The point of dialectical thought is not to understand the opposition between a thesis and an antithesis, but how the thesis undermines itself through its affirmation, dialectics affirm contradiction, not opposition. In this article, I have tried to conceptualize ‘people’ oriented politics as a clear symptom of the libidinal and social contradictions of the technocratic liberal order presented as a Universal by diving into the libidinal and political dynamics at play structuring populist enjoyment. As dissatisfaction with technocratic liberalism grows, we must recognize that the fear-mongering liberal discourse opposing populist savagery to liberal ‘normalcy’ is a false opposition that will only fuel populist enjoyment. If one wants to be critical of populism, one must also be critical towards technocratic liberalism. Horkheimer put it best in 1939 when he declared "If you don't want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism."²⁵ I thus try to identify the limits of Habermas’s thesis developed in Technology and Science as Ideology while not rejecting the entirety of its lessons. Habermas’s illustration of the necessity for capitalist growth to incorporate techno-scientific development and the rising technocracy within the administration of the social whole is the theoretical contribution from which I conceptualize populism as a symptom. However, I view Habermas’s reading of technocratic capitalism as asymptomatic, presenting the techno-scientific ideological configuration of technocratic capitalism as a Universal. I postulate that the contradictions of the infrastructural and superstructural dynamics of technocratic capitalism described by Habermas birth the symptom of populist obscenity, but that this explicitly anti-technocratic political movement preserves the interests of capitalism through the creation of the ‘outsider’ signifier which displaces the political malaise of subjects suffering from capitalism following its logic and a series of other libidinal strategies. Populism affirms the collective malaise pathologized by liberal discourse while letting capitalism off the hook. It is time to deconstruct fetish-oriented political discourse in favor of a universalist dialectical comprehension of the social whole.

I recognize that this theoretical exploration of the socio-libidinal dynamics of populism focuses primarily on its right-wing form. I have decided to do this as right-wing populism is more crudely pathologized by liberal discourse, seen merely as a political mistake from which we need to reaffirm ‘normalcy’. However, I believe that some of the basic affirmations defended above in regards to the nature of populism hold for both its right-wing and left-wing (as theorized by Laclau and Mouffe) affirmations, notably that they both channel social malaise by constructing a struggle against an imaginary enemy which permits the identification of the subject with the empty-signifier ‘people’. Even left-wing populism neglects (purposely in the works of Laclau and Mouffe) the structuring role of capitalism in subjective malaise and its political implications. I nonetheless recognize that more nuance is needed to properly analyze so-called left-wing populism and do not simply equate left and right-wing ‘people’ oriented politics.

Endnotes

¹ Jürgen Habermas, La technique et la science comme « idéologie ». Paris, Éditions Denoël, 1968. P. 57

² Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo:Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London:Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004). P. 94.

³ Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, (MIT Press, 2007). P. 91.

⁴ Sigmund Freud, The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc, 1993). P.674.

⁵Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore, 1972-1973, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975). P.10.

⁶ Sigmund Freud, The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc, 1993). P. 644.

⁷ Ibid. P. 639.

⁸ Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness. P. 64.

⁹ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L'Envers de la psychanalyse, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991). P. 39.

¹⁰ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973). P. 123.

¹¹ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre VII: L'éthique de la psychanalyse, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1986). P. 135.

¹² Donald J. Trump, "Inaugural Address," delivered January 20, 2017, Washington, D.C.

¹³ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973). P. 39.

¹⁴ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre VII: L'éthique de la psychanalyse, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1986). P.13.

¹⁵ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976). P. 170

¹⁶ Slavoj Žižek, "Against the Populist Temptation," Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006). P. 5

¹⁷ Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 147-157.

¹⁸ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre V1: Le désir et son interprétqtion, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1959). P. 168

¹⁹ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

²⁰ Ibid. P. 68.

²¹ Barret Weber, “Laclau and Žižek On Democracy and Populist Reason” in International Journal of Zizek Studies, vol. 5, no 1. (2011). P.11

²² “Notre Sujet Supposé Savoir” Ecole De La Cause Freudienne, May 6, 2022, https://www.causefreudienne.org/textes-fondamentaux/notre-sujet-suppose-savoir/.

²³ Jacques Lacan, Séminaire 22: R.S.I, 1974-1975. P. 120. http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/s22_r.s.i.pdf

²⁴ Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). p.16

²⁵ Max Horkheimer, The Jews and Europe (The Charnel-House, 1939)

References

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness. MIT Press, 2007.

Miller, Jacques-Allain. Ecole De La Cause Freudienne. Notre Sujet Supposé Savoir, May 6, 2022. https://www.causefreudienne.org/textes-fondamentaux/notre-sujet-suppose-savoir/

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. In The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc, 1993.

Freud, Sigmund. Fetishism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. 21, 147-157. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.

Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Strachey. In The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc, 1993.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by James Strachey. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

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