Politics and Psychoanalysis: The Great Enactment

More than anything, what has stayed with me about the conference is the final discussions between participants and audience, discussions which couldn’t help becoming ironic enactments of all that was in question throughout the event, especially the question of how we draw the boundaries between politics and psychoanalysis, between theory and practice, between thought and action. It seemed that for some of the younger participants, there was a frustration, a sense that the promised event—one which would not be just another conference but something different—had failed to occur. Instead, as one audience member complained, we had people talking, in long, erudite sentences, pausing to receive similarly long, thoughtful responses. What were they imagining was going to happen?

The organizers, who began by considering founding Oedipal and primal horde myths, played along, gamely allowing their symbolic murder. They conceded the gap between the ideal and what had happened and what had failed to happen. This was a tactical mistake. Or maybe a brilliant ploy, I’m still not sure. Smelling blood, some of the participants became bolder, fearing that the leaders of the conference were not yet adequately chastened for their failure or that they might even think something good had happened, or worse yet, make a plea for depressive position ambivalence, which by now everyone knows is nothing but a liberal copout.

The discussion veered, warbled, and wavered before arriving at a compensatory certainty, a faith, a demand to act, and a belief in action. At this point, this thing that had failed to happen was named and known. The fascists are coming, the genocide is ongoing, and still we talk, talk, talk. This is the failure. What didn’t happen is some kind of action that should have happened. Not that anyone said this exactly, instead it appeared as the demand behind the discontent, as evidenced by the ongoing discussion.

In one example, an audience member spoke movingly of their uncertainty about whether they should have been at the conference that day when they also could have joined others in work on behalf of refugees. A voice rang out: “Obviously, you should have worked with the refugees!” This was astonishing to me, who, after decades of practice, finds very little obvious, least of all the question of what one person should do at any moment of decision in their unfathomable life.

All of this seems to me to be an inevitable enactment of the basic questions at the heart of the conference. This being psychoanalysis, how did the restless discontents of the conference imagine something different was going to happen if not precisely through this kind of eruption, this kind of enactment? This was exactly the point of psychoanalyst and presenter Silvia Lippi, who, on leaving, tried to convey her own sense of how unique the conference had been from her European perspective, how rare it was to see this sort of open conversation, and the willingness of the organizers to hold such a conversation in the first place.

With these remaining impressions of the conference in mind, I went back to the essay “Freud and the Political” by Mladen Dolar (2009), which conference participants were asked to read in advance of the conference. In this essay, Dolar (2009) precisely lays out his vision of the relation between psychoanalysis and politics. For him, the danger, one that he believes Freud frequently succumbed to, is the danger of reducing ambiguity and complexity, of suggesting that Eros was the cure and the death drive the disease, for example. Against such simplification, he argues that psychoanalysis cannot arbitrate conflict because it is itself constituted by conflicts which it has no capacity to resolve. Dolar refuses to glorify action while denigrating mere theory, but instead emphasizes the necessary relation between psychoanalysis and politics, one that acknowledges the weakness of the demand to resolve ambivalence and ambiguity as much as it acknowledges the weakness of remaining forever in the impossible deadlock of eternal conflict. What remains to be examined in the aftermath of the conference is the way in which the final discussions in many ways reiterated a difficulty in negotiating ambivalence and ambiguity regarding the stakes of the political in its relation to psychoanalysis. Dolar writes,

One could put it this way: if psychoanalysis refrains from making a step, from deciding the ambivalence, filling the crack, proposing a new tie for the untied, if there is a missing step where a step would have to be made, then politics makes a step too much. It decides the ambiguity; it proposes a new tie; it engages what Badiou calls fidelity to the event, a subjective stance, a process of truth without a guarantee, a transformation. It turns the negative condition into a positive project, a movement, a party, a militancy. It proposes a new master signifier, although it may well be aware of its contingency. No doubt it thereby obfuscates the crack; it eludes the contingency and the ambiguity; it represents the unrepresentable—that is, it misrepresents it—but this is the price of taking the step. On the other side, psychoanalysis is not simply apolitical; rather, its circumscribing the site of the political is something that calls for politics, for an engagement in that site, for a step too far, although one can only do it at the price of entering into another logic than the one that sustains psychoanalysis. The circumscription of the site is no neutral description; it requires a step, although it itself doesn’t prescribe what this step should be. (Dolar, 2009, paragraph 35)

This would be difficult enough if there were even agreement on Dolar’s point. In that case, the inevitable content and discontent would be seen as the result of this tension between the two worlds, one psychoanalysis, constituted by a theory of conflict and destined therefore to repeat its own internal conflicts, and the other, politics, charged with the task of taking the leap, of losing ambiguity in favor of action. Unfortunately, there is no such agreement. Conflict over Dolar’s model adds another layer of conflict to an already conflict-laden undertaking. A conference on politics and psychoanalysis is an amazingly fraught thing.