Dropping the Bond or Dropping the Act?

When covid-19 unleashed itself in the United States in early 2020, large numbers of Trump followers—many of them working-class white Americans with bad or no health insurance, with an unsurprising distrust in government and the various institutions that have catastrophically failed most if not all of them in the last several decades, and who were easily persuaded by theories of hostile governmental takeover of their lives—refused to get vaccinated, to wear masks, or to keep a minimal distance from others, and then became very ill, infected many others due to their behaviors, and died. They had been primed by QAnon conspiracy theories about Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Democrats in general as ringleaders of a widespread sexual-abuse-of-children network, itself preceded by Trump’s prepresidential Obama “birther” conspiracy and others along those lines. Now they became entangled in the chaotic whirlwinds of an endless supply of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories about the disease, which many believed did not really exist but was in fact a twisted way for the “power elites” to reinforce their total power over them.

Bizarre beliefs were matched by bizarre behaviors, and incredible stories circulated; we all know them and there is no need to go into great detail. A handful of moments among them, however, can teach us something about our moment in time: Nurse Kathryn Ivey’s account of behaviors sticks in the mind, talking about veritable breaks in reality are hard to forget. covid deniers, she observed, “won’t see covid for the monster it is even when it stands shrieking in front of them.” She describes patients at the very moment of death in “the intensive care unit, all gasping and dying and begging for a miracle” (Ivey). Dramatic stories proliferated, which produced strange martyrdoms in a context in which other regular, enraged people were tearing down mask racks in stores, coughing on babies, and “sneezing” on produce in grocery stores, acts recorded by bystanders on their phones and then viewable online for all to watch. These same antivaxxers and their families died in droves. On October 5, 2020, Trump followers were further spurred on to try to enact strange covid-19 suicides when Trump, leaving the hospital where he had been seriously ill with covid, tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of covid. Don’t let it dominate your life!”¹ and back at the White House tore off his mask on national television, even though he was still contagious. The idea of suffering, struggling to the death with covid, increasingly transformed into an enacted political oath of loyalty to Trump, to a certain view of “America,” to “freedom,” and to the free market, an expression of belief and, more importantly, of being (or dying) American. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, infamously declared that “there are more important things than living” (Stieb) (namely, the free market) in a bid to reopen Texas in late March of 2020 without any testing equipment or disease-mitigating regulations in place.

Politics began sporadically to degrade to simple violence: in May of 2017, running for governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte “body-slammed” Guardian reporter Ted Jacobs for asking a question that annoyed him (an audio recording of the incident circulated online) (LaFrance; Guardian). The act was publicly praised and encouraged by Trump who, during his campaign and after he became president, repeatedly encouraged police brutality (Porter) and openly wished the Secret Service would just “beat the crap out of” protesters and critics (Parker). Also in May of 2020, the country witnessed the murder of George Floyd by police officers, a horrific murder recorded by bystanders on their phones, passed on to the public, and watched online by an entire country in various stages of lockdown due to the pandemic. Trump’s incitements to violence continued unabated. What had begun with direct, encouraging remarks was first raised into a more symbolic and institutionalizing display of violence when on June 1, 2020, Trump had troops use tear gas, pepper, and rubber pellets against citizens peacefully protesting police brutality in Lafayette Square in dc in order to clear a path for him (Rogers), accompanied by Ivanka and Jared Kushner, Attorney General William Barr, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley, for a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church while holding up a Bible. Throughout that summer, he thundered about “dominating” protesters in the streets. By January 6, 2021, having lost the presidential election, Trump turned to a second form of violence: badly organized, furious maga followers who camouflaged, for the perennially watching national viewership, the truly serious and disciplined violent paramilitary organizations who also heeded Trump’s call and helped storm the Capitol.

On the one hand, Trumpism has inspired his devoted followers to martyr their own bodies by putting them through the covid wringer; on the other, Trumpism has proudly displayed to the world the body of the Trumpian alpha male, first in the police officer not afraid to assault “criminals” and then, increasingly, in the paramilitary soldier. This latter trend is traditionally fascist, of course, and it is not surprising that Trump did eventually turn to it in a disturbing revival, though a weirdly perverted and distorted one, of the fascist adulation of the body in struggle, the body that marches, fights, and dies. The more specifically Trumpian body, however, seems to be not only a body that struggles but also a body that throws itself away and that lashes out in a sort of unpredictable short-circuiting of violent rage. This is a mundane rage that crashes mask stands at cvs, hisses at mask-wearers, and so on. Both are characteristic of the Trump era, and both can be seen as instances of what Jacques Lacan called the passage à l’acte, “passing to the act”: sudden, impulsive, rash acts, violent and often ending in death, individual or collective; moments that dissolve the social bond and tear holes into the structures of the social order itself.

Lacan discussed the passage à l’acte in his seminar on anxiety, Seminar X (Anxiety 109). The notion emerges for us, he contends, in Freud’s “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.” The event animating that case is a culminating moment when the woman impulsively, in a split-second act, throws herself suicidally over a parapet and onto the railway tracks when she encounters the disapproving gaze of her father, who sees her walking with her female companion. By suddenly jumping in this suicidal sort of way, she radically “let[s] herself drop” (110), says Lacan:

The impulse takes off in such a radical way at a moment (and Lacan claims this is always the case in a passage à l’acte) of “supreme embarrassment”: “All of this, this entire scene, is what meets the father’s eye in the simple encounter on the bridge. And this scene [aspiring to show the father what love should look like], which had gained the subject’s full approval, nevertheless loses all its value with the disapproval felt in this look. It is to this extent that there next occurs what we might call [ . . . ] supreme embarrassment” (111). Honing in on this key gesture of the passage à l’acte, “letting oneself drop,” Lacan says: “It is not for nothing that the melancholic subject has such a propensity to fling himself out of the window, which he always does at such disconcerting speed, in a shot. Indeed, inasmuch as it calls to mind the limit between the stage and the world, the window indicates for us what is meant by this act—in some way, the subject comes back to the state of the fundamental exclusion he feels himself to be in” (110).

Dropping Out of the Social Bond

Dropping out, murder-suicide, exclusion, violence, embarrassment, mortification: they stake out the emotional and phenomenological frameworks within which pro-Trumpian “politics” move. The subject swept up in a passage à l’acte falls catastrophically through the cracks and out of both symbolic structures and the social bond—even out of the frame of subjectivity itself. People critically ill with covid, and sometimes their families (who often were not allowed into icus to be with their dying family members) provided example after example (Larkin) of the passage à l’acte: a last act of totally impotent violence in an attempt to obliterate the crude fact of the virus’s existence, arguably in various ways representative of the predatory “power elites.” A likely source also of the “supreme embarrassment” experienced by people in such positions is an unacknowledged, enraged sense of betrayal and a mortifying final confirmation of absolute impotence. Trump in office tossed the nation, and certainly his followers, back and forth in everyday tempests of outrage, hate, and increasingly irrational and jouissance-filled conspiratorial inventiveness. In other words, dying also came with enjoyment: jouissance. The Trumpian subject, in a mix of mortification, embarrassment, rage, and masochistic enjoyment, breaks out of symbolic structures and jumps into modes of simply elemental living and dying. The passage à l’acte provides an instantaneous, catastrophic, and ostentatious smashing open of the structures of the social bond; it opens up and then compels the subject, a subject no longer, to throw itself away. In the Trumpian scenario, this dropping out seems to be laced with enjoyment.

What is it that is being thrown away? Staying with Lacan, it is the object a, that little piece of the real, remnant of our most primitive yet also most sublime substance, that thing of enjoyment that, psychically, gets us attached to, seduced toward, the world, society, others, to be a social, and eventually also political, creature, even as simultaneously we must also sacrifice it, that impossible jouissance, let it go—in other words, drop it—as we attach ourselves to law and society. This very moment and spot (simultaneous attachment and evacuation) is the kernel of the Oedipus complex, the pivot into the symbolic order. Object a is our most prized possession, our “essence,” and our relinquishing of it is our sacrifice to the social; without object a, no civilization. Attachment and evacuation must occur simultaneously, however, leaving us with the impasse that the object a is never present in itself, never tangible and definable, and yet it is our everything that promises redemption and fulfillment. The Trumpian passage à l’acte is of this sort: enjoyment while simultaneously dying for it, relinquished for the sake of the Other. Something is seriously off in the Trumpian scenario, however: the object a is supposed to be an object, something “in you” and “more than you” (Lacan, Four 263), but not your actual, entire body. When dropping the object a transforms into throwing away one’s entire body in an act of suicide, something else is going on.

The various ways in which we “deal with” object a, according to Lacan, determines “who” we are, what we do to ourselves, and how we live our social bond. This knot, this process, lies at the heart of Lacan’s discourse theory, presented in Seminar XX, which gives us entry into thinking about politics in the Lacanian mode. By discourse Lacan means a specific way of configuring power; object a is psychically and unconsciously inscribed in a certain way by every subject (conducive to sublimation, to sacrifice, to disavowal, and so on), thus configuring power in a certain way. The advantage of bringing Lacan into political theory is that it allows us, by definition, to include the dimension of the unconscious in politics: political theories, fantasies, processes, and acts are in part unconsciously determined; in Lacanian theory, the subject who thinks, feels, and operates politically is psychically determined by the play of discursive inclinations unconsciously dominating it from within and is usually dominated by one preponderant modality. That is, the range of available subjective discursive positionings for Lacan—their modus operandi, their aims, their needs—usually tilt toward one of the four possibilities that constitute the discursive landscape:

1. In the master’s discourse the dominant value is the subject’s certainty, and the Other is configured (for the subject) in such a way that it supports such certainty. The master masks their castration while drawing out the castration of the (supporting) “slaves”; the master catches the others’ surplus labor and, from that, sublime profit and enjoyment. It is not difficult to see Trump in this position.

2. The university’s discourse is dominated by the value of (supposedly neutral) knowledge (the sciences, the arts, and so on) and is always already unconsciously infected with the drive toward mastery. In our contemporary context, this discourse is partially but crucially in crisis when we think of the vilifications of scientific knowledge (and its representatives in Dr. Fauci, the cdc, “progressives” on the side of mitigation, and so on), as well as the widespread attacks on academics and the academy in general, in particular the Humanities, that came to such a head during the pandemic.

3. At the heart of the hysteric’s discourse is the subject aware of its own division that asks the Other the key question animating all power-laden relationships: “Who am I to you and who are you to me?” It is a discourse of questioning and struggle that defines the relationship between parent and child, master and slave, master and disciple, in short, the subject qua divided subject, symptomatically challenging its masters. A key image for the hysteric’s discourse is the gesture of “tearing itself open” for the master to see, witness, and justify. It is in these ways the quintessential discourse of politics; in its questioning and doubt, it is the discourse of the neophyte and reflects most essentially the structure of the social bond.

4. In the analyst’s discourse the highest value is the object a, with which the analyst wants the analysand to identify. We saw earlier that the Trumpian subject leaves its position within the symbolic order and identifies totally with its own object a in order to throw itself away. In contrast, the analyst wants to provoke identification with a, with the difference that, in the successful analysis, the analysand will not throw themself away, but will experience object a via the analyst and be held (by the analyst) in suspension, as opposed to landing on the trash heap, in order to reconnect with their drive—to then finally reenter symbolic networks in a different way, namely by passing through and beyond identification, which is where, in a lethal way, the Trumpian subject is located.

The Trumpian subject desires a master, rejects knowledge and university, and, I would say, is in part hysterical in that, as a hysteric, they tear themself open for the Other—in this case, the master. As hysterics, Trumpian subjects demand to know of the Other: What is truth? Who am I to you? but then almost immediately enter an epistemological whirlwind that presents truth as failed, worthless, irrelevant; truth is and should be destroyed, as should logos, the word, on the whole. As failed hysterics, they begin to drop out of the social bond very quickly. The Trumpian subject engages with the Other but almost simultaneously prepares itself as a delicious sacrifice, as, refusing doubt, it refuses its own hystericization. With this refusal, both politics and the social bond dissolve. While the analyst’s discourse is that of the object a presenting itself for the analysand in order to restart the analysand’s desire and get them to question their own division, the Trumpian subject identifies completely, lock, stock, and barrel, with object a and throws itself away—for Trump and for the free market that kicks working people in the shins day in and day out—fused together with the object that drops, object a: pure enjoyment and pure waste, pure burning trash heap, little piece of the real, sublime and abject simultaneously, pure jouissance and pure abjection.

Slavoj Žižek provides a felicitous example of the object a that also works within our context. He offers an image that flashes up for an instant, revealing our time, the age of hypercapitalism, its heavens now almost fully coinciding with its hells, wonderful and horrible at once, with the hells gaining in volume and sheer force every day. It also features a dropping corpse:

In my mind this corpse can be seen to represent our social bond, which is now fully identified with the sacrificed object that takes the whole body and mind with it out onto the trash heap. Žižek’s zeroing in on this image helps us anchor the Trumpian body thrown in the garbage within an extreme capitalism that has grown deadlier for more and more people every day.

In his discussion of the passage à l’acte scenario in Seminar X Lacan shows us when and why it takes place: namely, when the fantasy of a functioning social order no longer works and collapses. Why and how does it collapse? It is the function of object a to underwrite the particular fantasy that enables any social order to constitute itself (and float and work, so to speak), to promise subjects the substance they “deserve,” which will enable them to attach to and “buy into” any particular master signifier and its corresponding social “scene.” With the failure and dissolution of the fantasy—and that means the social bond itself—the object a must exit the crumbling scenario, and language and subjectivity themselves, and to flush itself down the toilet. The corollary of this state of affairs is that, as symbolization itself decreases, excess jouissance becomes increasingly less disguised. Object a as surplus value, that extra enjoyment (in the form of profit), becomes increasingly obscene on the part of the rich and powerful, while working conditions, where the surplus is extracted, are more and more openly brutal, coercive, often lethal, as seen, for example, in the sweatshop fires in Bangladesh and other such events (see CBC). This is what we might see in Hitchcock/Žižek’s image of the corpse that rolls out of the resplendent new car and thuds down onto the factory floor. A downtrodden American white working class surely sees itself there as well. Roberto Harari writes, “The object that provokes anxiety in the neurotic is the a-Thing [the objet a prepared as a sacrifice for the Other], that is, the desire of the Other, as the Other requires that the subject erase its borders, handing itself over to it in an unconditional manner. Lacan points out that in this place is to be found, supposedly, a kind of jouissance that is reached through abdication” (75). We see Harari referring to the jouissance I am alleging seduces subjects into self-sacrifice. An alternative to this hellish sacrificial furnace (for the white American worker) is to insert into this plan a rewriting of the scene in such a way as to quickly and defensively transform the workers’ own potential passive inclusion in capitalism’s world of suffering into a scene of active, semidelusional exclusion of those “others” (like the rows of young female Bangladeshi corpses burned alive or crushed to death lined up in the video footage) that Western workers consider to be on the outside, beyond the pale—who, they believe, are not-they but who nevertheless, the fantasy goes, are threatening to engulf them. In any case, the fantasy in which what steps out of the shiny new car would be a new, white, and living working-class car owner has collapsed, and the worker has thrown himself onto the imagined garbage heap of history. To say it more psychoanalytically: when the worker performs self-immolation, or is already quietly dead without anyone noticing, he or she had already at the start of the fantasy thrown him-or herself at the feet of the master, ready to perform self-sacrifice. Castration, the inauguration of the split subject as negotiator into the social order, has been transformed into a perverted assembly line of self-sacrifice—for example, in the ragged diseased flesh efficiently produced in pandemic hospitals. The Trumpian subject has committed to exiting the symbolic order and simply does so, quickly and traumatically, in a suicidal plunge. Thus, this subject’s psychic itinerary goes from specular identification (with the leader), sought after for its stabilizing effects (the heavy-handed far-right, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and so on identifications) that divide the world into “friend” and “foe,” to a short-circuiting drop into nothingness, all while knowledge and politics, like the social bond itself, devolve into utter nonsense.

But of course, it is not to Trump that this violent sacrifice—murderous and suicidal—is really made, but rather to the obscure gods of corporate capitalism. In his later work Lacan alludes to a fifth discourse that, however, lies outside of the social bond: the discourse of the capitalist (“Milan”). Its obscurity is its essence: a relentless drive of a blotted out, opaque, and sadistic order of corporate totalitarianism.

“Sadopopulism”

It seems clear that Trump supporters operate from a place—or nonplace—of exclusion and neglect by the entire political class, including most Republican lawmakers. Bizarrely, when Republicans are in power, they work diligently to undo all social and economic safety nets—including health insurance, food stamps—for these very segments of the American population, their most fervent supporters; such legislative undoings directly victimize those very groups, and their effects create untold suffering and distress for the population that will enthusiastically and enragedly continue voting for them. (Legislative cruelties of this sort victimize other parts of the population as well, of course, but it is stunning to see economically struggling Trump supporters vow revenge for Trump and his supporters, the very people who do everything they can to render those supporters more destitute.)

Timothy Snyder uses the felicitous term “sadopopulism” to name the socioeconomic and political scenario defined by this constantly emergent and clamoring Trumpism, with its grievances and readiness to “fight” (“Sadopopulism”). Trump in power as president was not even remotely about thinking, legislating, and making policy; his activity was simply about ceaseless distraction from actual governing by keeping his supporters suspended in a constant oscillation between outrage and gleeful enjoyment (of Trump “sticking it to the libs”), and about the disavowed production of suffering (in the form of minimal or entirely lacking health insurance, economic misery, drug addiction, crumbling and quickly disappearing government support, devastation of American cities and towns, zero new infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance) precisely for the blue-collar white working class that blindly and unshakably supports him. Of course, this works for populist agitators: the suffering and rage that is thereby generated can be manipulated and turned against immigrants, people of color, “wokeism,” academics, and so on.

Snyder has defined the socioeconomic order of our moment in the United States as “wannabe oligarchy” (American oligarchy, though emergent, being less developed than Russian oligarchy, for example [see “America”]), and our politics (with Trump in power) as “not even fascism” (see “On Language”), because an American Trumpist state has shown itself to be capable of doing only three things: tax cuts for the wealthy, political and personal corruption, and being white. The latter means: looking back at a fictional America of the past, “real” and “great,” which supposedly cherished and respected a resplendently white working class living in harmony within a resplendently white American society that pulled itself up by its bootstraps and thereby became “great,” where women were obedient and stayed at home while children knew that they were either boys or girls, and so on. In reality, of course, such an America never existed in the past, certainly does not exist in the present, and will not exist in the future. Neoliberalism and American oligarchy have created untold suffering by way of economic misery, fear, and distress in a sea of violence that mounts exponentially day by day, where people of color, women, immigrants, lgbtq+ folks, children, and other “minority” groups have become open prey. Ridiculous projections of an America of the past go hand in hand with historical amnesia and, increasingly, attempts to revise history entirely, as print-based culture is increasingly censored, abridged, and taken off the shelves altogether in schools and libraries. Snyder calls the form of politics defining the neoliberal era, which maintains the volatility and sheer misery of what others have called “technofeudalism,”² the “politics of eternity.” This is a politics in which change (and with it time past, present, and future), seems (and possibly is) doomed; all political “doing” has either transformed into a politics of eternal “being” (race, gender, nationality) and “feeling” (hate, mockery, sacrificial enjoyment) or has degenerated to a dimension of “doing” that is pure violent acting: hourly mass shootings, assaults and attempted murder on politicians and their families, constant death threats against judges, jurors, election workers, Democratic members of Congress, and so on. While planned and coherently executed murder and mass murder attempts and executions are often not instances of a passage à l’acte insofar as they are not impulsive, but are, rather, meticulously planned, and because they may lack any element of supreme embarrassment and subjective mortification, nonetheless, cars or vans ramming into protesters (especially if they are of color) and horrific (and often unnecessary) bouts with and deaths by covid-19 are impulsive, as there we see a breakdown of the social bond and a sort of explosion of the subject as it falls out of and leaves the scene entirely.

Chris Hedges, via Karl Polanyi and Sheldon Wolin, refers to this structure of oligarchical contemporary American society and sadopopulist governance as “corporate totalitarianism” (“Conversation”). Polanyi’s lesson in his The Great Transformation, regarding the rise of fascism, was how the economic and social elites, including big business and financial institutions, consistently turn to fascist movements when the free market has powerful antisocial side effects, the likes of which we are clearly experiencing now. The self-destructiveness that buoys and favors Trump politically has been a long time coming and is, I am arguing, a result of dissolving social bonds. With technological, social, and political change comes the weakening of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, of consistent and meaningful ways of working in the world, of a shared sense of the very fabric of reality, and of a sense of participation in a political system. Hedges contends that with the formal establishment of the corporate state, its power clinched by the Citizens United case³ and maintained by the constant flow of dark money into politics that increasingly bolsters corporate power, and with the ever-increasing concentration of wealth within the tiniest fraction of the population, with all of its ramifications, it is not hard to see how median-to-low wage earners can quickly become hopeless. As of the end of 2022, 68.2 percent of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the top 10 percent of the population, while the lower 50 percent of the population have only 3 percent of the nation’s wealth (Statista). One of the most striking symptoms of this obscene disparity was, before Trump even arrived on the scene, the opioid crisis. Social mobility is dead. Émile Durkheim’s notion of anomie (normlessness, rule-lessness) and the connection he draws between anomie and suicide have again become highly relevant as the strangulating power of the corporate elite and, more importantly, absolute corporatism in the United States have sentenced huge swaths of the population to a state of constant economic fear and distress and attending emotional and social consequences. By now, one of Hannah Arendt’s definitions of totalitarianism, namely that the totalitarian regime’s targets and victims come to cooperate in their own destruction, has come true, as the Trumpist, largely white, struggling working classes often call for the destruction of “Obamacare,” which supports them, and the dismantling of the welfare state that in many cases aids them. Arendt also clearly lays out the closely linked phenomena of dissolving social bonds, radical loneliness, totalitarian affinities, and (self-)destructive tendencies (317, 474). Not only are the possibilities for public and political action destroyed but people’s emotional lives, their capacity to communicate with others and themselves—to think, to have feelings of happiness and serenity—are being shattered: “Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well” (475).

It is precisely in this space, there where the Trumpian subject turns against itself in order to throw itself away, that our attention must be directed. Psychoanalysis can help us understand the dimension of this singularity, this impasse that takes place by way of an absolute mirroring, there where the subject not only pronounces a loyalty oath with its hand on its own life, or where it realizes that its only space for being is in not-being, but where it is also persuaded to throw itself away. What takes place at this impasse, this glitch where it feels that the master demands nonexistence of it, is a sort of magical transposition away from itself and its suffering—but toward what?

Some of the new savagely authoritarian segments of u.s. society—vulnerable to sadopopulist rapture and self-ejection from the scene of politics (and life) through violence against themselves and others, driven to despair by a growing inability to survive economically within a technofeudal corporate totalitarianism (Brown), falling prey to the fantasy of a past America that endures only in fictional and fantasized accounts of “America,” mortified by their own weakness, their apparent inability to be seen, cherished, respected, and loved back by the beloved father—turn to an often shocking form of passage à l’acte, most of the time enacted against racialized others, the fantasized “caravans” or “incursions” of migrants at the southern border, women, trans kids, and other “minorities,” and themselves.

Passage à l’acte and Statelessness

How can we understand this self-relegation to the trash heap—in addition, that is, to Lacan’s description of this dropping and tossing of the body when it occurs as a consequence of the subject’s abject identification with object a in the passage à l’acte? I have said that this reckless, uncontrolled tossing of the body occurs when the social bond is lacerated and dissolving and the subject, crazed without a social bond, falls apart. Such bodies—and the psyches that inhabit them—are like errant flies searching for a container or stabilizer without being able to find it. Here, Lacan’s later addition to his classical discourse theory takes us a bit farther with a fifth discourse, that of the capitalist (“Milan”).

The capitalist discourse lies outside of the bounds of the social bond. It is associated with a new kind of symptom, one that is about immediate jouissance unencumbered by fantasy. These symptoms do not signify, they are not addressed to the Other: they include anorexia, bulimia, cutting, addiction and are all associated with the capitalist command to enjoy immediately, via consumption. All consumption is immediately followed by disappointment (the commodity was not “it”) and then by more consumption. Capitalist discourse is “pestilent” (11) in the sense of infectious obscene consumption driven by suicidal object a, its version of desire, namely unending greed, a mouth that never closes, an object a not just materially but literally ever present, pure sublime substance: alcohol, opioids, porn, and so on. The subject lets go of the word, the address to the Other. The Trumpian who throws themself away for Trump enjoys their own dissolving physical, often fatal positioning within the world. It is an actual literal dissolution that produces plus-de-jouir. And crucially, others’ bodies, dissolving them, can do the trick as well.

This notion of a dissolving body and taking pleasure in it might also evoke a different psychoanalyst: Sándor Ferenczi and his understanding of the psychic shattering that occurs when a child is being traumatized. Ferenczi is also the theorizer of the victim’s identification with the aggressor, later developed and translated into political theory by Arendt. Both Ferenczi and Arendt develop an understanding of a subject without social bond. In his famous paper “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child” (1933) and in various parts of his Clinical Diaries (1932), Ferenczi describes what occurs to a psyche and body traumatized by sexual assault as well as physical and emotional neglect and abuse—which he calls, specifically, “authoritarian abuse.”

The most fundamental effect of this abuse is a catastrophic psychic Erschütterung (fragmentation): “If a trauma strikes the soul [ . . . ] [t]he power that would hold the individual fragments and elements together is absent. Fragments and elements of organs, psychic fragments and elements become dissociated” (Clinical 69). This “power” that is “absent” is precisely the familial and social bond. In severe trauma, which for Ferenczi means essentially psychic murder and death, the psyche whirls in a state of dissolution; it then attempts to cure itself by way of a deeply unconscious act of reassembly, even in the face of almost inexorable dissociations. The combination of dissociation—dissociation between intellect and emotion, mind and body, agent and patient, predator and prey—and the unconscious reassembly (the idea is in part deeply Kleinian) that can sometimes come to “rewire” such subjects, sever and reconnect them in symptomatic ways (though such “last-resort” self-salvations are not the typical outcome), should be of enormous interest in contemporary psychoanalytic and political theory.

Can Ferenczi help us read this perplexing moment in American society and politics and its sadomasochistic pleasures and horrors? I want to suggest that his extraordinarily clear and visual depictions of traumatic psychic shattering in what he calls authoritarian abuse and various possible instances of “rewiring” by a psyche that is attempting to cure and save itself can help us if we briefly, maybe even just as a sort of theoretical exercise, transplant it into the wider social arena that is normally governed not only by the familial but also the social bond. I do not think that it is entirely coincidental that Ferenczi was working, thinking, and writing in this vein during the rise of fascism in Europe (1932–1933).

Let us single out three potentially relevant ideas in Ferenczi. The first is that for Ferenczi victims of authoritarian abuse are characterized by “extreme impressionability” (Clinical 148): in response to the lethal attack coming from without, they turn to mimicry as a mode of defense and make themselves conform to the agent attacking them, while “they,” or, rather, their previous selves, have a “tendency to fade away,” lacking any support in effective “self-protection.” Instead, what takes place is an “immediate resignation and adaptation of the self to the environment” (148).

The second idea, more image than idea, is Ferenczi’s paraphrase of a patient’s verbal description of the status of her body that emerged from a fantasy she had involving a “gigantic” rape: “She sees her body unnaturally laid out, like that of a dead person; powerful heart palpitations accompany this fantasy. After about twenty or twenty-five violent jolts [Erschütterungen] which overwhelm her like waves of pain, she feels nothing more but regards herself, her body, as a stranger, from the outside” (Clinical 66–67). In our context, the image works isomorphically for the pervasive alienation of enormous groups of people and for what Hedges, with Durkheim, calls anomie: the alienated body lying outside the bounds of social bond.

The third idea is Ferenczi’s identification of a key dissociative—and consequently murderous and simultaneously suicidal—mechanism: identification with the aggressor. Recognizing that it is in mortal danger as the victim of a life-threatening assault of whatever nature, the psyche suicidally leaves its own body and identity behind in order not to be the victim and thus to survive what it recognizes as a murderous attack. Better to be the aggressor, the murderer, through identification, than the victim—for the sake of survival.

All three ideas depict a form of profound displacement and “statelessness”; that is, all three scenarios are about a devastating disappearance. All three are also images of a dissolving social bond. It seems clear to me that they are related to another similar state, namely the state of the subject in a “state of exception” as formulated by Carl Schmitt (Concept) and picked up by Giorgio Agamben, who depicted “bare life” in a literal, physical sphere in which life and death themselves roam about unpredictably, lacking any sort of civil protections or a place in the social bond.⁴ These theories are well known and need not be rehearsed here.

No less urgent is yet another isomorphism in this series of dissociations: a scenario we have all heard about that seems, on the surface, clearly distant, but not only because the actual context is geographically detached, which makes displacement that much easier. On May 20, 2023, the New York Times ran a front-page video-article titled “Greece Says It Doesn’t Ditch Migrants at Sea: It Was Caught in the Act” (Stevis-Gridneff). The video, taken surreptitiously from quite a distance but with a zoom lens that leaves no doubt about the nature of the events taking place, records the following: “On April 11 on the Greek island of Lesbos, 12 migrants—men, women, children and an infant—were locked inside this unmarked van, forced onto a speedboat, transferred to a Greek Coast Guard vessel, and then abandoned in the middle of the Aegean Sea, in violation of Greek, European Union and international law. They were left adrift in an inflatable emergency raft.” One sees clearly police and coast guard helping adults and children onto the boat before abandoning them on a raft. We see, particularly clearly, the baby handed off by one of the officials. It is no secret that this particular form of atrocity has occurred repeatedly and is occurring in the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas as well as the Atlantic Ocean this very instant and will continue to occur as migration from the South grows only more desperate given the ramifications of climate change and endless wars. Migrants as “merely living” and desperate stateless creatures would seem to offer an ample supply of targets for the sadism of our age. Migrants, through their literal statelessness, are and will increasingly become open prey, perfectly suited for sacrifice, the object a’s act of “falling away,” and are in this way identified with object a: identified, targeted, and eliminated, thrown out, evacuated. Certainly, in sentiment and action, such abandonments and killings in no-places (the middle of the ocean) of nameless, stateless men, women, and children that occur without record are linked to, and are symptoms of, the growing anomie and sadomasochism produced by a global capitalism that increasingly suspends basic human rights and protections. The destruction of basic human rights and protections has become a pastime offered up not only to xenophobic mobs but to governments as well.⁵

Arendt warned repeatedly that statelessness played a crucial role in the generation of atrocity and crimes against humanity. In Origins of Totalitarianism she declared statelessness the problem of our age, as events like the one that took place in Greece were becoming the norm. Statelessness, she wrote, is

Loss always takes place when formulating the existence of fundamental human rights (namely, to have the right to exist and to be alive in a particular place in the world, the right to “mere life”), in fact, the right to have rights, for when a right is formulated it inexorably brings along with it its negation. Again, in Origins of Totalitarianism she writes, “[T]his calamity arose not from any lack of civilization, backwardness, or mere tyranny, but, on the contrary [ . . . ] could not be repaired, because there was no longer any ‘uncivilized’ spot on earth, because whether we like it or not we have really started to live in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether” (296–97). Statelessness, literal and figurative, is the reality but also the symptom of our time. We are left with the question of what sorts of acts can mitigate, or even overturn, the relegation—forced or chosen—of certain bodies and lives to such zones of lethal anomie. How do we navigate the sadomasochism of our age, which has a flavor all its own? The essays that follow give us some indications.

Notes

Works Cited