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# 046
Unquestionable Freedom in a Psychotic West.
In the end, democracy, entailing a freedom of choice, is the
prerequisite, for Muslims as much as anyone else, for creating
a society that is both cohesive and fair.1
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,
and I ain’t nothin’, nothin’ Honey, if I ain’t free.2
Freedom is not something to be thought about!3
This article was inspired by several encounters I have had with the representation of ‘freedom’, as if
freedom is a thing-in-itself. The foremost is the description by George Bush of freedom as a gift to the
Middle East; a gift that can be given to the Iraqis in the form of democracy, commodity choice and
religious ‘tolerance’.4 This is particularly notable in his speech to Marines at Camp Lejeune, but
repeatedly in other pronouncements, including his speeches to the Australian parliament and to British
citizens, respectively. Freedom, for Bush, is a gift, wrapped and decorated by the United States, with
the assistance of the ‘coalition of the willing’. This image is mirrored in Western popular culture
through cinema, advertising and product imagery. For example, in the Wachowski Brother’s Matrix
trilogy freedom is had in the caves of Zion, and celebrated through the very white loins of Keanu
Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss (in Matrix Reloaded).5 Then, outside the cinema, a momentary glance
towards the shopping complex sees freedom further presented in its presence as inspiring and
animating the loins of the Western subject in the form of Tommy Hilfiger ‘Freedom Jeans’, ‘Freedom
Perfume’ and the Ford ‘Freedom Car’ (just to name a few).6 Later, at academic forums, when I have
attempted to discuss some of these images, I have been confronted by several assertive statements
assuring me that freedom is something the West has, and something the West has to give. Indeed, the
response to my questions regarding the conditions of possibility for thinking about freedom in the West
has appeared to offer a platform, in both the US and Australia, for an assertive statement that “we do
have freedom to give!” as if I’d said otherwise; as if the very question itself threatens the having of
freedom. Hence, I suggest in this article that despite - or perhaps because of - the presence of freedom
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in its presence as image, gift, commodity, indeed, as democracy itself, freedom is not something to be
thought about.
The war on Iraq and the initiation and application of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ presented freedom as a
gift to the people of the Middle East. This reiterated the already prolific representation of freedom as a
quality that inheres in ‘freedom’ products, images and simply being free in a Western democratic
nation. The being of being free is filled with shifting form and content. Like the ever attentive Other to
the psychotic, freedom approaches at every moment through its substance and substancelessness, ever
interpreted to fill the fantasies of psychosis. Indeed, freedom has a psychotic place in the imaginary of
the Western subject, its signified status being conveniently and often contradictorily explained through
the assertive broad sweeps of contemporary liberal democracy. As if democracy itself offers inherent
freedom and the fundamental elements in the enabling of free choice. The Western subject, who might
currently be described as the citizen of the countries signed up as the ‘coalition of the willing’ (to
invade Iraq), wants to bask in this psychotic space and imagine himself the central figure in the Other’s
gaze. But like J.R.R. Tolkien’s eye of Sauron,7 the gaze of the Other is never fixed; even the psychotic
must perform an activity to maintain the fantasy of its omnipotence.
The Western subject, having been subjectivised through and subjected to the dominant narratives of
liberal discourse - with an emphasis on individual liberty, representative democracy and legal
positivism – rests (un)easily in his/her location as a subject in the ‘free West’. The Western subject is
the subject who enjoys their freedom through choosing and purchasing, and struggles to see (if not
assertively resists) the possibility that there was ever a questionable status to the having of freedom. In
contemporary times this subject can now rest a little easier as s/he who inhabits the world where
freedom is had and given significance in a positive form. Freedom is everywhere and anything that
articulates with the tropes of liberalist democracy. And, freedom is apparently in such excess in the
West, that it can be given as a gift to others.
The subject of this freedom, the subject who is represented in the speeches of Bush and Howard as s/he
who has, who possesses, this freedom qua gift - the Western subject, who I will hereafter refer to as
2
‘West’, the man8 - can now take up a fantastical position. West, having been hailed by the
(supposedly) popular peoples’ choice, is able to inhabit a position of fantasising himself as a free
subject, as a subject for whom the ‘I [he] takes himself to be’9 is a free ‘I’, an I who has freedom to
give. But what is this freedom subject West supposedly has to give? Arguably, the freedom George
W. Bush claimed to be giving the Iraqi people was the freedom to participate in the governing of their
nation - a protective, if not participatory, version of representational democracy. In his speech to the
British people and Queen Elizabeth II he described ‘advancing freedom’ as a ‘democratic revolution’
no less.10 This is the freedom for Iraqis to vote for a representative of their choosing. And indeed, with
the sanctions lifted and US companies enabled and protected in their entrée into Iraq, Iraqi’s will soon
have the freedom to choose the very same ‘freedom’ products Americans have in their homes. The US
is bringing Iraq ‘freedom’ indeed, and as Americans are (currently) fond of saying: ‘Freedom does
come at a cost’.11 George W. Bush counters the quantification of the cost of freedom and asserts the
positivity of freedom as an incalculable gift when– in defence of his budget requirements for the war -
he poignantly asks: ‘how do you measure the benefit of freedom in Iraq?’12 Freedom’s benefit is
incalculable and this assures its gift status. And, it is precisely this status that then reinforces the
positive parameters of freedom. George W. Bush could well iterate Janice Joplin’s sentiment, mutatis
mutandis: freedom itself ‘ain’t nothin’ Honey if [it] ain’t free’, the double negative assuring its
positivity and its economic freeness assuring that it is indeed a gift. In the original lyrics (of Me and
Bobby McGee) it is also Janice’s freeness as a ‘free I’ that is at stake – ‘[she] ain’t nothin’, Honey if
[she] ain’t free’. The terror of this ‘nothin’’, which we might call the Real of freedom,13 I will
extrapolate as precisely the psychotic condition of West in the contemporary West.
In this article I will discuss the presentation of the presence of freedom as a substance psychotically
signified as any trope of Western democracy; as any trope which signifies choice through products,
political practice or engagement, and presence (if not active participation) in the democratic nation.
Freedom, in contemporary ‘war speak’ has become any signifier which articulates with the being of the
subject in the democratic nation. The significance of freedom in nations described as the West, or the
‘coalition of the willing’, I will explain as a signifier fortified in its given meaning through the giving
of freedom as a gift to others. In the first section I will explain the ontological location of freedom in
the Western subject using the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and a brief discussion of the child
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Max’s situation in the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are,14 as a product of the subject in
subjection through Western discourses of freedom. I will then discuss the psychotic status of subject
West in his identification as a free subject in Western democracy with a consideration of Jacques
Derrida’s explanation of the (im)possibilities of ‘the gift’.15 The use of psychoanalysis as a method of
analysing the psyche of the social, that is, as a method of ‘socio-psychoanalysis’,16 will finally be
interrogated as a problematic methodology. I will not interrogate psychoanalysis proper for its
universalising leanings. Psychoanalysis is a particular methodology for assessing and interpreting the
1 ‘Arab Women: Their Time has Come’ The Economist Vol 371, No 8380, June 19, 2004, p.14.
2 K.Kristofferson ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ performed by J. Joplin, released 1971.
3 J.Rogers ‘‘The gift’ of freedom is given! Foreclosing on Das (Freedom)Ding through Matrix
Reloaded.’ unpublished conference paper, Law Culture and Humanities, University of Connecticut,
March 11, 2004.
4 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/04/20030403-3.html; ‘President Discusses Operation
Iraqi Freedom at Camp Lejeune’, April 3, 2003. Camp Lejeune is a Marine Corps Base Camp in North
Carolina. George Bush was addressing Marines and their families. ‘George Bush’s Speech’ Sydney
Morning Herald October 23, 2003. This sentiment is reiterated by other leaders of the ‘coalition of the
willing’ such as John Howard in Australia.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030503-1.html. President Bush, P.M. Howard
Discuss Operation Iraqi Freedom. May 3, 2003.
5 Wachowski and Wachowski (1999) Matrix, (2001) Matrix Reloaded, (2003) Matrix Revolutions
(films) Warner Bros.
6 The ‘freedom car’ produced by Ford and funded by money allocated for research by George W. Bush,
assures the purchasers of ‘freedom from petroleum dependence’ and ‘freedom to choose the car you
want.’ http://www.ford.com/en/innovation/engineFuelTechnology/freedomCar.htm; Tommy Hilfiger
Freedom perfume tells you precisely that ‘Freedom is classified as a refreshing, flowery fragrance.’ (I
assume they are talking about the scent, but it’s never clear).
7 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Harper Collins, London, 1968).
8 I reference West as a ‘man’ because at this point I intend to discuss him as a diagnosable individual
and because the name is standardly associated with that of men in the West. He could just as easily be
sexed female.
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subject and as such offers multiple complex modes of interpretation and assessment. Its practice is best
applied in the clinic, but can offer some useful tools for considering contemporary manifestations of
social policy and sentiment. I will however consider the problematic, common in what I’m calling
‘socio-psychoanalysis’, of establishing a homogeneous human subjectivity; the problem of suggesting
that there is only one patient: West. Socio-Psychoanalysis will therefore be critiqued for its
employment as a mode of analysis which operates to name the motivations of the subject, as if all
subjects have the same relationship and responses to notions of freedom, and indeed notions of
persecution since ‘September 11’. Object-relations group psychoanalysis will then be considered for its
usefulness as a methodology of ‘rule by the people’ with particular emphasis on the role of the hysteric.
The problems and potential use of psychoanalysis will thus be explored in the final section of this
article and further discussed as a metaphoric illustration of precisely the problematics of the ontology
of subject West in relation to his participation in democracy.
9 This is Lacan’s configuration of the subject who sees itself in the ‘mirror’ and assumes it is a ‘whole
subject’ unified in its capacity to speak, act, and inhabit the world with other beings. For Lacan this
‘whole I’ is precisely not the condition of the subject but the necessary representation of the subject to
itself. J. Lacan ‘Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’, Ecrits: A Selection. (Norton, USA,
2002), pp. 3-9.
10 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3282465.stm; Bush sets out 'mission for freedom', BBC News,
Nov 19, 2003.
11 http://congress.org/congressorg/bio/userletter/?id=656&letter_id=93134026 Letters to Leaders,
Congress.org; May 31, 2004; http://www.collegenews.org/x3207.xml Candidate's Vietnam Experience
Reminds Us That "Freedom Comes at a Cost," John Kerry's Biographer Tells DePauw Audience, April
5, 2004.
12 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/03/23/MN204798.DTL Bush team sets war
cost at$80billion. Estimate comes after Congress has OKd budget, March 23, 2003.
13 I have developed the notion of the Real of freedom in ____ ‘‘The gift’ of freedom is given!’ in W.
MacNeil, L. Davies, C. Morris, ed., Galactic Jurisprudence, in press.
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I take as my point of interrogation in this paper, the moment of participation in representational
democracy as recognising (or misrecognising) oneself as a free democratic subject who chooses. This
performance of the recognition of being a choosing individual may be through performing ‘democracy’
through letters, demonstrations, rallies and voting, through consideration and purchase of products, or a
negative comprehension of not being not free. In part, the distinctions between participatory, protective
and elite forms of representational democracy are irrelevant to my argument insofar as it is the
perception of one’s ‘I’, being a free I, which is at stake. Paradoxically, one could argue that these
distinctions are precisely relevant insofar as the enactment of freedom in democracy can be viewed as
intensely attached to one’s capacity to exercise ‘choice’ qua free choice within democracy; and
‘choice’ is the free individual’s operative par excellence. How to enable one’s capacity to participate in
democracy is then the fundamental question, but a question I am addressing here in terms of the
performance of the subject in subjection, not specifically within the structural methods of ‘participative
democracy’. It is one’s choice to participate that I am concerned with. Indeed, choice in democracy
can be viewed as the very instantiation of being free, and the opportunity for this ‘choice’ as the
location of the Being of being free. In this paper it is specifically this question of the moment
(encompassing both performance and location) of exercising a choice - this being free in a democratic
nation - I will explore, using Lacanian psychoanalysis of the ‘social imaginary’, with some hybrid
intervention, drawing on Melanie Klein. It is the psychotic function of this being free which concerns
me for its enabling of both the giving of the gift and the persuasion, of those who believe they give,
that their freedom is indeed had under the current operations of ‘coalition’ governments. Further, I
believe it is the function of the socio-psychoanalytic and the democratic non-dynamic - that is the lack
of ‘speaking back’, or lack of recognition of the voices of dissent and disruption as (precisely ‘free)
speech’ - which participates in this psychosis.
14 M. Sendak Where the Wild Things Are (Harper Collins, New York, 1984, 1963).
15 J. Derrida, Given Time:1. Counterfeit Money (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,
1992).
16 The term ‘socio-psychoanalysis’ is hybridised from ‘socio-analysis’ to encapsulate the use of
psychoanalysis to analyse the social. The term ‘socio-analysis’ is used by some object relations
movements which analyse the social arrangements of organisations and groups. See Socio-Analysis
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A: I The moment of choice
The moment of the articulation of the Western democratic subject as a subject of Western democracy is
the moment of performance of the self as a freely choosing being. It is the moment of performance,
either through enactment of voting, speaking against or speaking to, or it may be the moment of a lack
of objection to the limits of freedom exercised through the originary violence of democracy. Free
choice, as represented in the neo-liberalist discourses however, implies a choice initiated within the
capacities of the individual.17 This may be so, but the individual always already encounters a fierce
limit upon his freedom to choose. The individual must choose only within the intersubjective limits of
language, that is, he must be subject to. And, his very desire - the very orientation to the object of his
choice - takes on a significance through the significance of the Other. The problematics of making a
‘whole choice’, or what we might call an ‘absolutely free choice’ as a whole individual – one who is
supposedly separate of the corporate relations of community and the a priori processes of subject
formation - both limits the subject and instantiates the other as Other. In democracy, the other is the
Other who recognises the subject as desirable, that is, it is the perceived recognition (as desirable) the
subject imagines and symbolises. As Lacan has described, the Other ‘is the beyond in which the
recognition of desire is tied to the desire for recognition’.18 In democracy it is precisely this desirable
subject qua free subject – the subject who perceives itself as desirable because being free in democracy
is a desirable ontology for the Other - who recognises himself as free and chooses (performs as free)
accordingly.
The moment of the subject’s formation in relation to his desires and desirability in the face of the
Other, is well articulated by Desmond Manderson in his discussion of Maurice Sendak’s children’s
17 This is particularly evident in postcolonial discussion of the ‘woman’ as the free individual of
Western feminist movements. As Gayatri Spivak suggests ‘feminist individualism in the age of
imperialism, is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and “interpellation” of the
subject not only as an individual but also as “individualist”.’ G. C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. (Harvard University Press, USA, 1999), p.116.The
West, Spivak suggests, has an ‘isolationist admiration’ p.246. See G.S. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts
and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry (1985), pp.242-61.
18 J.Lacan, ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’, Ecrits: A Selection. (USA, 2002), p.163.
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book Where the Wild Things Are.19For Manderson, the journey of the protagonist of the book - the
child Max’s journey - is the recognition of the instantiation of law qua ‘justice’. Manderson’s
description, mutatis mutandis, is helpful to understand the instantiation of the praxis of the subject of
democracy qua free choice. Max, having being described as a ‘wild thing’ by his mother, wants to
wear his ‘wolf suit’, brandish his fork at the family dog and ‘eat [his mother] up’. His needs are
thwarted however, when she responds to his (cannibalistic – and arguably oedipal) statement with a
metonymic ‘no’ in the form of sending him to bed without supper. Max then journeys across the ocean
in his mind and his boat (called ‘Max’) to a narcissistic fantasy land where the ‘wild things’ do all that
he needs; one could say they perform his needs. Max is quickly lonely and dissatisfied with this and
returns to his bedroom to find his supper waiting for him. He then removes his ‘wolf suit’ and appears
to relinquish his wildness or, one could argue, his freedom.
Max’s Mother, having exercised the ‘no’ as, what Lacan would describe, the ‘paternal function’,20
offers him supper (and arguably her care) as a substitute for his loss of ‘wildness’. Through his
removal of his wolf suit, as Manderson describes,21 Max appears to accept the limits of the law as
justice, as fair. The desire of Max’s Mother (not to be eaten) becomes the needs of the Other; but Max
has lost something of himself. Arguably, he has lost elements of his freedom. Manderson’s suggestion
is that Max now recognises that there are limits to the achievement of his needs in an intersubjective
world.22 He relinquishes much of his narcissistic orientation in the interests of achieving harmony, and
arguably love, with an-other. He becomes what he perceives the Other wants him to be. His ‘free
choice’ as a wild thing is subjectivised through the moment of encounter with the needs of an-other by
being subjected to his desire for the desire of the Other. His freedom is compromised, and what
19 D.Manderson, 'From Hunger to Love: Myths of the source, interpretation, and constitution of law in
children's literature', Law and Literature 15 (2003). pp.87-142. (pagination 1-66, as referenced from
http://www.law.mcgill.ca/faculty/manderson-hunger.pdf).
20 J.Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, Ecrits: A Selection. (Norton,
USA, 2002), p 298.
21 Manderson, ‘Hunger’, p.55.
22 These are the limits of harm to another asserted by John Stuart Mill. See J.S.Mill, On Liberty, in G
Himmelfarb ed, (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974).
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remains and is apparently still understood as a ‘free choice’, if Max were a ‘normal neurotic’, would
become an object of constant question. Max has lost something of his freedom and, if he isn’t
traumatised to the point of psychosis through this moment, he will retain a question about this loss.
The difference between the hysteric (as a normal neurotic) and a psychotic exists precisely in how Max
will or will not accept the ‘no’. Max as a neurotic, at the point of loss, will wonder what he has lost;
just as West - if he too were an hysteric23 - at the point of encounter with the democracy of/as Other,
will question the loss instantiated through democratic rule qua law. The hysteric will question how the
law can be enacted upon him (and for him in the case of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’) while still
professing to offer freedom to him. It is West’s psychosis which dismantles this question. The
distinction between Max and West however, is precisely the question of the heterogeneity of subjects
before democracy and before socio-psychoanalysis. While Manderson suggests that Max accepts
‘justice’ as the limits of the law, we really do not know what Max has done with this limit, this ‘no’.
He, as the subject of socio-psychoanalysis,24 may be many subjects before this limit. I am suggesting
that West’s position is specific however. West assumes a psychotic position. As the subject of liberal
democracy - as desirable to the Other - West is a subject who appears not to retain the capacity to
wonder about the limits of the freedom he may, or may not, retain beyond the originary instantiation of
democracy. In contemporary times, he is not a subject who questions those limits.
B: 2 The psychotic’s choice
The subject of representational democracy is represented as a subject who can (and, in Australia, must
actively) perform a choice in respect to who will be his representative/s and how he will respond to the
actions of the democratically elected rulers. This choice is based upon the subject’s knowledge,
understanding, and contemplation of the issues. As a subject he is subject to, that is, he is influenced
23 The structures which define the subject in its relation to the Other, for Lacan, are the neurotic, pervert
and the psychotic. I am using the category of hysteric – as subset of neurosis - specifically to illustrate
the structure that would propel Max into a position of questioning what the Other wants from him.
24 Manderson is not strictly using a psychoanalytic reading in his explanation of Max’s subjectivity, but
his use of Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud, together with the representation of Max as the subject
before ‘justice’, observes similar parameters and methodologies to socio-psychoanalysis and, as I will
explain later, is vulnerable to the same critique. Manderson, ‘Hunger’, pp. 35, 39.
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or, subjectivised through the articulation of the politics, persona, and presence of the party or particular
politician, with its own desires. Just as Max internalises those of his m/Other, the subject will make his
choice based on the desires which are the desires of the Other. In a political arena, in the arena of
democratic politics, the articulation of the desires of the subject (who mis-recognises himself) with the
choice he makes, will operate in recognition of the values of the Other. Just as Max will not ‘eat his
mother up’, he will accept his supper as a substitute for his ‘wildness’ because it articulates with what
he perceives the m/Other to want, and thus secures her love and desire. Like Max, the subject wants the
desire of the Other and will represent himself as able to choose - perform his gestures to have himself
recognised – in regard to whatever the perception, the ontological recognition, of the desires of the
Other are to the subject - and this perception is the limits of his individuality. West, the adult-
choosing-subject, and Max the child-subject, will perform as desirable (and desiring) subjects in the
democratic landscape in order to be recognised as the desired subjects for the Other. The Other is not a
fixed Other however, indeed it is precisely the Other’s very ‘subjectiveness’, the way the subject
interprets the Other, which arguably forms the substance of the very thing called ‘individuality’; the
choice of the individual. West does not simply staple his desirability to a fixed, consistent desirer –
even God and the law vary in interpretation. West will respond to the hail of the m/Other qua God,
language, law and/or the nation-state, through the limits of the discursive representation of what it is to
be an ideal, subject.25 And these limits are founded on the culturally contingent production of what it is
to be an ideal subject in West’s world.
B: 3 West’s (psychotic, free) World
West’s contemporary world is the world of the subject of the ‘coalition of the willing’, a world where
the tropes of liberal democracy reign supreme and West’s body, indeed West’s actions as a democratic
subject, both signify and are signified through these tropes. This is to say no more in effect than West
25 The ‘ideal’ subject implies an enactment of the subject in relation to the ‘Ideal-Ego’ for Lacan. The
subject who (mis)recognises itself as Ideal or desired (in the mirror) to the Other. The Other can be
understood as that which is ‘in possession of the code’, a code which is perceived, or understood or
imagined by the subject, to define the coordinates of his/her desirability. This function can exist in any
other or structure for the subject, such as a parent, law, God, teacher etc. J.Lacan, ‘The Direction of the
Treatment and the Principles of its Power’, Ecrits: A Selection (Norton, USA, 2002) p. 222.
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is an empty subject and functions as an ‘individual’ produced through hegemonic discourse and votes
and/or exercises his democratic rights to be free accordingly. As Renata Salecl has explained the
democratic subject using Immanuel Kant:
The Kantian notion of the abstract, empty subject can be used to
establish the theoretical basis for democracy. The essence of
democracy is that it can never be made to the measure of concrete
human beings: the basis of democracy is the subject as a pure empty
place. Democracy is always only a formal link between abstract
subjects.26
The ‘link’ between subjects is rendered ‘formal’ through their participation in democracy as ‘voters’
(or potential voters) with more or less participation in the acquisition of knowledge about their vote of
choice. The subtleties of the hegemonic discourses of democracy - the qualities that link people less
formally - being propagated through language and dispersed from the moment West’s infantile cry
might have been signified as the demand to ‘be free’ of his cot, stroller, or sister’s (too loving) arms.
West can link himself formally to the democratic community, but his identification as a desirable
subject in the imagined gaze of the Other requires a further performance as a particular type of
democratic subject - a desiring, choosing, freely being subject.
In the contemporary West the discourses of freedom permeate the being of the democratic subject as a
being in a state of being free. The propagation of the performance of a necessarily free subjectivity
enacting and enjoying its freedom through democracy is less a desire than a dictum in countries such as
the US and Australia in these times of ‘war and/on terror’. Witness the vitriol and (almost lethal)
aggression perpetrated towards David Hicks (Australia), Richard Belmar (GB), and the (unproved)
suspicion of Chaplain Yee (US), as committing espionage – betraying his free country. These are all
men who could be ‘free’ in the West but have pursued a Muslim life; a life that is represented in the
West as antithetical to a state of freedom. These men have allied themselves to a religion which, in the
West, evokes images of violent punishment and strict adherence to an ‘unfree’ lifestyle. The Muslim
lifestyle is represented as demanding adherence to clothing codes, sexual standards and religious
practice; standards which, if transgressed, are said to result in ‘barbaric’ punishment. The free subject
26 R. Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism.
(Routledge, New York, 1994), p.5, (my emphasis).
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must perform as a free subject and enjoy his freedom accordingly. West, the man, must align himself
to the dictates of freedom in the West and indeed to the very country which espouses that it has so
much freedom, it has freedom to give. West, as a democratic subject, must do more than formally
link himself to a community through voting, his subjectivity must articulate with the qualities of the
free subject of Western democracy. As Salecl explains:
The invention of democracy brought with it the notion of a forced
choice and a sacrifice the subject has to make in order to become a
member of a community. The social contract, which incorporated the
subject into symbolic community, is linked to the subject having to
make a choice. The subject has to choose freely to become a member
of the community, but this choice is always a forced choice – if the
subject does not choose community, it excludes itself from the society
and falls into psychosis.27
Salecl’s configuration suggests that psychosis is the state for those that do not choose to link
themselves to community, but she does not mean formally link; in fact, precisely not a formal link.
One can choose not to vote or exercise their democratic rights as a participant in representational
democracy, but psychosis implies a ‘not choosing’ the intersubjective associations of community; not
choosing to adhere to the social meanings of language. The choice is always already made for the
psychotic. The psychotic, according to Lacan, does not accept the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ through
castration, that is, they do not accept that language has a paternity, a meaning prior to their
signification. We could say that the psychotic father’s his own language.28 Thus, a psychotic can
certainly vote and exercise his democratic rights to speak in respect to the rule of the nation, but his
psychosis is betrayed in his foreclosure on the socially coded significance of that act. The psychotic,
like the despotic sovereign, makes his own meanings. And, this, I will argue, is the condition of West!
B: 4 Freedom and psychosis
27 Op. cit., p. 126, (italics in original, underline my emphasis).
28 J. Lacan, The Psychoses: Seminar III Jacques-Alain Miller ed. (Norton, New York, 2001); J. Lacan,
‘On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ Ecrits: A Selection (Norton, USA,
2002). I have taken some liberty in summarising Lacan’s explanation of psychosis in the interest of
economics and comprehension for the reader.
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The contemporary discourses on freedom, which assume a ‘givenness’ to the ontological experience of
freedom in the West, articulate with a Lacanian configuration of psychosis. For the psychotic West
meaning is made of freedom as if it had no paternity prior to an explanation offered through the
characterisation of objects/products as being freedom. The products do not simply ‘equal’ freedom but
they are freedom insofar as they represent choice and freedom as a state. They are called freedom and
they exist as available and are therefore freely choosable. Freedom is blue jeans, it is cars, it is
perfume, it is voting, it is simply being in the democratic nation. Its fragmented and floating
signifying structure could be argued to be as erroneous as the Nation-Thing described by Slavoj
Zizek,29 that is, it could be anything; but for the fact that it’s not anything, it is everything within the
democratic nation. It is everything that articulates with the subject’s interpretation of what the Other
wants. Like the popularised notion of the name allocated the sex-worker - it is whatever we need it to
be!
The significance offered freedom, in contemporary liberal discourse which advocates democracy as the
spearhead of freedom, articulates with all forms of symbolic association within that democracy. Like
Freud’s ‘kettle argument’: a man who borrows the kettle denies he has returned it with a hole in it using
three logic(s); logics which are all reasonable, and yet contradictory.30 It has no hole; it already had a
hole; I never borrowed the kettle. This too is the signifying structure of freedom.31 Hence George W.
Bush can advocate war to bring a ‘democratic revolution’ in the Middle East with: ‘We seek the
advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings’32. He can locate peace/war/freedom/democracy
as if they are the same thing(s) and somehow not at all contradictory. Indeed, he receives commitment
29 S. Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, (North Carolina,
Duke University Press, 1993), particularly pp.200-202.
30 S. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, (Allen & Unwin, New York, 1932).
31 Zizek has also suggested that Freud’s joke is analogous of the contradictory argument(s) George W.
Bush used to justify the invasion into Iraq. My use of it here is intended to be complimentary to
Zizek’s argument, not in disagreement. See S. Zizek, Iraq and the Borrowed Kettle, (Verso Books,
New York, 2004)
32 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3282465.stm; Bush sets out 'mission for freedom', BBC News,
Nov 19, 2003.
13
of military troops from Britain, a royal welcome and resounding applause from the British people for
this psychotic request. Freedom’s symbolic associations in property and praxis are often convenient
and contradictory. They adhere to a psychotic non-paternity which denies any possibility of social
signification beyond the moment. Advancing freedom is war; advancing freedom is peace; advancing
freedom is democracy as freedom itself. No problem. The product/gift based signifying structure of
freedom in this context disables the question to the Other – who would question the benefits of freedom
and peace? Certainly, no subject who wants the desire of the nation-state-Other. And Bush’s
‘incalculable’ gift/advance thus takes on a psychotic significance. The explanation of freedom does not
have to ‘make sense’, it simply has to meet absolutely and without question with the perceived desire
of the Other, or the perceived demand of what the Other wants. This is both the condition of the
commodity ‘freedom’ that can be purchased, and the excess freedom which can be given, or we might
say, advanced.
Bush gives the freedom the US has to the Middle-East using the explanation of a democratic system,
links to an (unsanctioned) global free-market, secular government and choice of religion as that
freedom. Aside from the reality of many people being unable to vote in the US33 and being unable to
comment regarding the rule of the nation, the originary violence of democracy itself surely invalidates
the notion of free choice, free speech, the very being of free. Indeed, protective representative
democracy is secured through the law as a condition which must adhere to its own laws, unlike the
despotic sovereign. Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida have argued however, that the violence of its
instantiation is antithetical to its premise, (or promise) of democratic rule; or, that democracy precisely
inheres a violence. As Derrida argues, there is no democracy (in terms of those that have been deemed
to have arrived) worthy of the name.34 The instantiation of democracy and free choice through the
violence of military invasion and maintenance, coupled with the disregard for the free speech uttered
by ‘the people’ in ‘coalition of the willing’ nations, surely suggests a sovereign-like paternity to the
33 Specifically in reference to people who have been imprisoned for criminal offences in some states of
the US.
34 J. Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Cardozo Law Review.Vol 11
(1990) p. 1013; W. Benjamin ‘Critique of Violence’, Reflections – Walter Benjamin, Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (Schocken Books, New York, 1986).
14
concept of freedom. It is what we make of it in response to what we think we need to be for the Other,
(or, the freedom/kettle is whatever I want it to be!) The significance of freedom is then retroactively
instantiated in democratic nations, however. It is as if freedom had a complex paternity that existed
prior to its presentation as something the nations of the ‘coalition of the willing’ had to give. And, this
is the sovereign moment of the psychotic. West makes meaning according to the application of a self-
fulfilling and contradictory logic. He can retroactively signify his forced choice, as a democratic
subject, as a free choice through representing freedom as some-thing he always already has, something
he chose! And, if he can’t afford it, then this is his responsibility as a desirable/desiring subject for the
Other.35
Like Max, his supper now signified as ‘wild’, maintains the ‘I he takes himself to be’ as a ‘wild thing’,
as a ‘wild I’. The free subject West ‘takes himself to be free’ through a psychotic leap which
announces his forced participation in democracy (whether he votes or not) as a ‘free choice’; like the
infant whose needs are subjectivised through language as articulating with the recognition of the Other.
But Max, as a ‘normal neurotic’, evinces a wry, Mona Lisa-like smile which may indicate that he
knows that supper isn’t really a ‘wild thing’, that his freedom is still in question. West, in his
acquiescence to democracy and perhaps even the ‘war on Iraq’, appears not to know this. The signified
status of freedom is assumed and thus foreclosed, and subject West of democracy is maintained as a
psychotic, but nonetheless ‘free I’.
A: The psychotic freedom of the sovereign
This psychosis is evident if we make the necessary changes to Derrida’s use of Madame de
Maintenon’s letter to Madame Brinon regarding her time. Maintenon writes ‘The King takes all my
time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give it all.’36 Maintenon’s relation to time
35 The argument that the subject is imbued with a fantasy of its responsibility (particularly under
Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies in Britain in the 1980s) has been well developed by Zizek in his
discussion of the ‘fantasy’ presented by Thatcher that all British citizens could be, would be wealthy if
only they exercised their ‘good British’ capacity as individuals to be so, thus it was their fault if they
were not wealthy. See Zizek, ‘Tarrying’.
15
displays some obviously ‘psychotic’ or perhaps simply ‘mad’ elements. She believes she both has time
to give while all her time has been taken from her by the King. As Derrida suggests ‘by all good logic
and by good economics’37 she has no time once the King has taken it. The same can be suggested of
freedom. If the freedom of choice to participate in democratic society is a forced choice, as Salecl
suggests, then what is the freedom that the subject supposedly has, in respect to the freedom to choose
within a democratic state? One could say the subject has other freedoms, but this is not the rhetoric of
George W. Bush in respect to Iraq, and indeed democracy is linked to freedom insofar as one is
regarded as being in a state of freedom if one is a being in a free democratic state. The metonymic
relation of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in the West is as intimate as Max’s Mother’s survival and her
‘no’. Indeed, in research obtained by Freedom House, the ‘Map of Freedom 2002’ the organisation
produced, ‘tracks’ democracy and interprets its findings in terms of nations that are ‘free’ ‘partly free’
and ‘not free’.38 John Howard goes further and describes ‘liberty and freedom’ in terms of ‘the
democratic way of life’.39 In the West ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ stand in for each other (and Howard
adds a dash of ‘liberty’ for good measure). Democracy as free choice and free market is precisely the
significance offered the freedom given to the people of Iraq and, in recognition of the originary
violence of democracy, the ‘forced choice’ described by Salecl. West, the man, whose psychotic
subjectivity is currently being militarily dispersed to an apparently free Iraq, could easily write: ‘The
democratic state takes all my freedom, I give the rest to the ‘I’ I take myself to be, (via an orientalisng
logic,40 and blue jeans) to whom I would like to give it all.’ Of course, if freedom is democracy, then
this statement is precisely a madness. How can the democratic state both be and take West’s freedom?
West, the man, maintains the recognition of himself as a free subject, in the face of the confusion of
metonyms and the violence of democracy, through a psychotic leap. West can maintain the ‘I [he]
takes himself to be’ as a ‘free I’ through the representation of himself as having freedom to give, and
this is the freedom he can apparently give Iraq. In giving to them he is simultaneously giving - via the
logic of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ - this freedom to himself. If he can give freedom to those who
don’t have it, by all ‘good logic’, he must have freedom to give. What defies ‘good logic’ is his having
in the first place. As Derrida suggests, one gives:
16
seeking through the gesture of the gift to constitute its own unity and,
precisely, to get its own identity recognized so that that identity comes
back to it, so that it can reappropriate its identity: as its property.41
This is achieved firstly through an identification of others as ‘not free’ – notably Freedom House’s
‘Map of Freedom 2002’ - but perhaps more significantly, as an identification of himself as being free;
as being able to give to himself. And it is here that the purchase of chosen ‘freedom’ items for himself
enable a representation of freedom as both had and haveable as a commodity. West can acquire
freedom and do with it what he chooses. It is his to have. This is the identification of himself in the
gaze of the Other; but this is a psychotic relation.
The subject’s orientation towards freedom in the free West - via his identification of himself as
desirable to the Other - is psychotic insofar as it denies the question of the significance of freedom. It
denies a question to the Other. The position which West might have adopted – like the uncertainty
evidenced in Max’s wry smile – is a neurotic relation to the Other. The neurotic embodies a question
as to what the Other wants. West, the neurotic man, would ask in a democratic nation “how can I really
be a free subject?” or, “Is what I’m doing really enacting freedom?” The status of freedom in
signification is necessarily problematised for the neurotic. In the contemporary conditions in the West
post ‘September 11’ which have produced an environment of ‘terror’ (of course we’re never sure
whose terror it is) the ability to maintain a question for West, regarding whether he is or isn’t free,
36 Derrida, ‘Given Time’, p.1.
37 Op. cit., p.2.
38 http://www.freedomhouse.org/pdf_docs/research/freeworld/2002/map2002.pdf;
Map of Freedom 2002, Dec 9, 2004.
39 http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech532.html; Transcript of Prime Minister the Hon John
Howard MP Address at the National Remembrance Service Honoring The, Victims of the Terrorist
Attacks in Bali, Great Hall, Parliament House, Canberra. October 16, 2003.
40 The ‘orientalisng logic’ I am referring to here is taken from Edward Said’s complex discussion of the
logics of ‘Orientalism’. E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Penguin Books, New
York, 1978)
41 Derrida, ‘Given Time’, pp.10-11.
17
suffers an assault. An assault that forces West into a state of psychosis. The psychotic, according to
Lacan, has no question to the Other. The psychotic knows what the Other wants, knows exactly what
things mean. The psychotic suffers no confusion as to the relationship of signifier to signified and
hence forecloses on the lack in the Other.
The subject who would experience its freedom as a forced choice in the democratic nation
acknowledges, even if only fleetingly as a reflection of unconscious understanding, that the nation has
lack, that the nation wants something from it in order to function as a democratic nation. But the
subject who then perceives that it has freedom to give, even though its freedom is forced, forecloses on
the lack in the Other and thus perceives a givenness to the significance of freedom. The very act of
recognising oneself as choosing, purchasing and/or advancing – a gift for others or oneself - implies an
act of giving (to the democratic nation) as an absolutely economic moment; that is, as if the subject gets
back exactly what he gives, with no lack on either part. This is both an issue of product purchase and
enacting the (recognition of) freedom to purchase through being a democratic subject. West is a
democratic subject because he votes, and the nation is democratic because he votes. Neither lacks!
And, the questionable experience of effective participation in this regime, that is, the question of the
meaning of the exercising of free choice as a democratic subject remains unproblematised; it remains
unquestioned. It remains unthought about.
Signifier freedom and signified freedom, thus collapsed into a knowing what freedom is, enable the
formulation of being free, for the psychotic subject, as anything which explains their contemporary
situation and reformulates their situation into one in which they are the ‘good’ and ‘right’ ones. This is
evident particularly in the representation of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind whose psychosis, in one
form, offers him the representation of himself as saving the US from infiltration by communist forces.42
Similarly Judge Schreber, the quintessential psychotic for Freud and Lacan, imagines - at the point of
his fully developed psychosis - that he is God’s partner and that he will (re)populate the world through
his union with God.43 This can be easily extrapolated in Bush’s logic in terms of the ‘war on terror’ as a
response to ‘Sept 11’, as a pre-emptive response to the ‘envy’ others have of the goodness of the West.
18
And, as a goodness enacted through a war on badness – terror holding an already existing ‘bad’ place
in the social imaginary of the West and being retroactively signified as ‘bad’ through the specific
labelling of death and destruction as ‘terrorist acts’. This goodness is further evidenced in the
description of the invasion of Iraq as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, as if the US is doing a ‘good thing’
with its ‘goodness’. Anti-Apartheid, Civil Rights and anti-slavery movements together with Tommy
Hilfiger products already signifying ‘freedom’ as ‘good’ and Operation Iraqi Freedom retroactively
adds to this signification by virtue of metonymic association. Doing good things with one’s goodness
is also the condition of the very ordinary subject West in relation to his participation in representational
democracy. His goodness is in recognising himself as being free – voting/choosing to vote/
recognising the choice – and thereby giving to the Other. The democratic nation takes all his freedom
to be otherwise, but still he believes he has freedom to give (either to himself, others or the Other).
B: 2 West and hegemony
West forecloses on the moment of traumatic encounter with the possibility of not having freedom or of
not being free. The ‘I’ West takes himself to be is a free ‘I’ and this is maintained in the face of
contradictory examples of the exercising of freedom, such as the participation of West in democracy as
a free subject through a forced choice. Signifiers of freedom are then enlisted in the mode of the
psychotic to assist in the absolute assertion that West is what the Other wants. This is evidence of a
psychotic structure for Lacan. In strict Lacanian diagnosis West would have always been psychotic
and events - such as ‘September 11’ - just triggered the psychotic industry (the collapsing of meaning).
A Lacanian hybrid of Melanie Klein’s ‘object relations’ emphasis, which highlights the possible
transience of the psychotic subject, is, in my opinion, more helpful in diagnosing West’s current
condition. For Klein psychosis was not fixed, as it was for Lacan (and is for Kleinians and Lacanians
respectively), but indicative of an experience of extreme anxiety resulting in a kind of infantile retreat
into the paranoid-schizoid position; the position of absolute good and absolute bad, of life and death.44
42 R.Howard, A Beautiful Mind, (film) Universal Studios and DreamWorks, 2001.
43 S.Freud, Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia
Paranoides), SE 12, (Penguin Freud Library, London, 1911); D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous
Illness, (New York Review Books, New York, 2000).
44 M. Klein, The Writings of Melanie Klein R. Money-Kyrle ed., (Free Press, New York, 1984).
19
Bush’s ‘you’re either with us or against us’ statement post ‘September 11’ emblematises such a state; a
place where there is no complexity, no ambivalence, no in-between. In this place there is no question
to the Other - using Lacan - and there is no thinking about what freedom is, or what freedom means.
For West, freedom thus becomes what object-relation psychoanalysts describe as an ‘unthought
known’, similar to a ‘master signifier’ for Lacanians. The ‘unthought known’ is an idea signified
through its articulated status as coming from the master’s discourse, or in contemporary ‘master
discourses’,45 emanating from the masters of liberal nations - George Bush in the US, Howard in
Australia. Freedom is enabled as ‘unthought (but somehow) known’ through both its status as gift
given to Iraq, as commodity choice, and through the foreclosure on the experience of a forced choice in
the place of a representation of a free choice.
West’s experience of infantile subjection enables an articulation of his subjectivity with the Other
through the representation of what the Other wants in the liberal discourse of the demands of
democracy. West, as a free subject, can take himself as the ‘free I he takes himself to be’ with the
assistance of the propagation of the ideal subjectivity being one which has freedom; freedom to give, at
that! It is when the parameters and demands of this mode of being come into conflict that the psychotic
function appears and West collapses signifier and signified to maintain the certain belief that he is the
‘I he takes himself to be’. For Lacan, the threats to the given status of the ‘I’ are the most traumatic of
all for the subject. Arguably, ‘Sept 11’ and subsequent dialogues in the West about the questionable
‘goodness’ of freedom as the free-market, and the free status of West facing possible ‘terrorist attacks’,
function as a threat to the ‘free-I-ness’ of West. When West hears statements such as those made by
Howard after the Bali bombings: ‘Perhaps we are more vulnerable than we imagined’,46 he feels a
threat to his I-ness. Indeed, his imaginary feels under attack, or perhaps in question. And this question
must be definitively answered; we could say it cannot be maintained as a question. These events and
discussions may have triggered a psychosis in relation to freedom. ‘Sept 11’ both metaphorised the
threat to the given status of the signifier freedom and metastasised the signification of freedom in
liberal discourse. An assertive maintenance of the ‘free I’ identification of West, lends some weight to
45 J. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, Encore: Book
XX, Jacques-Alain Miller ed. (Norton, New York, 1998) pp 16-17, 31-32.
46 http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech532.html; Howard ‘Transcript’. p 1.
20
the orientalist explanation of why the ‘coalition of the willing’, in the face of increasing awareness of
the impoverished status of their citizens, and aggressive restrictions on ‘freedom’ - through efforts such
as the Patriot Act 200147 in the US and the ASIO Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act 200348 in
Australia - would aggressively assert the need to go to war to give freedom to others. Indeed, the
symptom of the psychotic is the constant assertion of his truth to the Other. There is no question! West
does have freedom, and every purchase of jeans, perfume and cars, every vote (no matter how similar
the parties), every demonstration (no matter how ineffective), every experience of multiple brand
names in the supermarket, functions as an “I told you so!” (as if anyone was asking).
But people are asking, and here’s where socio-psychoanalysis and the hegemonic function of
democratic rule qua freedom discourse display their similar allegiance to the non-dynamic.
A: 1 Patient West’s Speech: the many (im)patient West’s
I heard the sound of freedom in Baghdad's Firdos Square.
…It sounds like machine gun fire.49
Freedom is not something to be thought about in the West and by West. But some people are thinking.
The voice of the hysteric, the voice of the normal neurotic, who questions their status as being free is
sometimes audible above the din of the purchase of a free subjectivity. A Western subjectivity is no
more absolute in its universal status than a free subjectivity. West, the psychotic subject of liberal,
democratic discourse is only one (type of) man; just as Manderson’s Max, is only one type of boy.
While I can suggest that hegemonic discourses mobilise the consent of many people in the West this is
not the same as saying that all these people are psychotic. As Gayatri Spivak has noted in respect to
47 USA Patriot Act 2001 (HR 3612)
48 The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act 2003
(Cwlth) amends the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 in July 2003 to enhance the
capacity of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to combat terrorism. As it states
‘The Act empowers ASIO to obtain a warrant to detain and question a person who may have
information important to the gathering of intelligence in relation to terrorist activity.’
49 http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=5270§ionID=15; N. Klein, ‘Freedom
Fires’ ZNet, April 5, 2004.
21
Marxist and Psychoanalytic methodologies of analysis – to focus on something ‘on a higher level of
abstraction than the machinery, production, and performance of the mental theatre, and as obviously
global as capitalism’, is different from speaking of the pathology of the individual subject through a
critique which is so ‘culture-specific in its provenance’.50
Foreclosure is a diagnosis of the clinic of the psychotic in psychoanalysis. It appears in the fragments
and ruptures of the discourse of the analysand and while it may also appear in the fragments and
ruptures of the dominant discourse of the West, the West is not in analysis! Manderson’s Max, Salecl’s
democratic subject, and my West are similar in their representation as monolithic subjects. All possible
and useful representations of subjects, but even, insofar as there are a few represented here, we can say
that there is certainly more than one in world, even in the West. We can say that there is more than one
way of responding to the problematics of free, and/or forced choice in democracy. This is a question in
part of mandate but also of technique. While it is possible to offer some psychoanalytic explanation as
to the meanings of some social gestures, it is impossible to diagnose the social imaginary, any further
than saying that many things are said, emblematised, gestured to, a lot! And, some things emerge as
dominant. Just as it is not sufficient to say because many people have read Where the Wild Things Are
that we are all Max. Similarly, to give West a name exposes the ‘unary trait’ of the proper name; it is a
particular name of a particular subject and it hopefully exposes the pretentiousness of socio-
psychoanalysis. 51 Zizek’s attempts to diagnose the social imaginary through the analysis of dominant
signifiers, while fascinating and often insightful for their consideration of some types of behaviour,
have similarly been criticised by theorists such as Butler for their universalising of the psychoanalytic
50 G.C. Spivak, ‘Echo’, in D.Landry & G.Maclean, G eds., The Spivak Reader (Routledge, New York,
1996), p. 177.
22
subject.52 Most notably, his suggestion of the fear of the Real embodied in the image of Spielberg’s
Jaws suggests a relation to the Real that is constant and homogeneous. The problem is possibly the use
of psychoanalytic subject formation of the Real, imaginary and the symbolic as the articulation of
every subject, but certainly the suggestion of an absolute, universal relation to the Real. In the case of
West, it is a suggestion of a universal relation to the Real of the signifier freedom. While, I accept a
use of psychoanalysis as social critique is deeply flawed in its construction of all subjects formed with
and through this tripartite structure, however, if one is to use psychoanalysis then one must use
Psychoanalysis. One must consider that psychoanalysis was developed in and for the clinic, and that to
propose a diagnosis often takes years of dialogue with the patient. My concern here relates to the
suggestion of universal and isomorphic adherence to a signifier with only a limited analysis of some
public discourse. The suggestion, then subsequently formed, denies the possibility of a heterogeneity
of relationships to the symbolic, Real and imaginary. It denies the subject as subject. This denial is
precisely the problematics of a suggestion of both a psychotic relation to freedom and a democratic
relation to freedom. Just as one cannot say all subjects have a psychotic relation to freedom, one cannot
say that all subjects are ‘free’ in democracy by virtue of participating – to more or less degrees – in a
democratic system, or by purchasing ‘freedom’ products.
A: 2 Democracy and socio-psychoanalysis: the word of the master.
To suggest that freedom is collapsed into a socially floating, but subjectively fixed, status as had by the
Western subject, denies the very real experience and speech of people who suggest that they don’t have
the freedom espoused by the leaders of the ‘coalition of the willing’. To suggest that everyone believes
51 The research of Ghassan Hage and his use of socio-psychoanalysis to understand the implications of
his findings are largely an exception to this pretentiousness. This exceptionality is largely due to the
use of qualitative empirical research to back up his claims. Hage’s use of multiple responses from
interviewees in his research enables a complex account of his socio-psychoanalytic conclusions. It is
arguably his attachment of language to the particular subject interviewed which renders this work
complex and insightful. See G. Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural
Society. (Pluto Press, Australia, 1998)
52 J. Butler, E. Laclau, S. Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on
the Left. (Verso, London, 2000), p.26.
23
they are free is as aggressively monolithic as to suggest that the US has freedom to give. From the
position of discourse analysis it is problematic to suggest that the subject believes it is free; from the
position of democracy it is problematic to act as if everyone believes they are free. The problem of
both arrangements is the refusal to enable the ‘speaking back’ of the subject; the refusal to engage in a
participatory formulation of relationship. Simply, the refusal to engage in relationship! Arguably, this
may be more true of socio-psychoanalysis than the standard form of representational democracy;
indeed there is much to suggest that the peoples’ representatives must and do listen to the majority
(even if it’s only a particular kind) of the people. There is however, a lot to suggest that the socio-
psychoanalysis performed by social theorists, listens to only a particular voice of the subject. This
voice is the one that can be heard through news media, cinema, political speeches and sometimes
empirical research, or the one that can be seen in popular culture.
The problematic of the hearing of the subject is precisely explained by Spivak in her discussion of the
subaltern. The subaltern can utter, she says, but cannot speak, that is she cannot be heard. Her voice is
always already domesticated or assimilated into the modes of recognition of the listener as soon as she
speaks. 53 The subject who speaks in democracy can similarly be viewed as domesticated through the
mechanisms of democracy. Speaking, in democracy is represented as speaking assent to democracy. In
respect to the having of freedom in the democratic West, the location of the subject who questions – the
hysterical subject – is akin to the subaltern insofar as the voices of the hysteric are domesticated and
assimilated into dominant discourse as precisely emblematising the mechanisms of democracy. It is
important that the people speak ‘freely’ in democracy, as it is important that the analysand speak freely
to the analyst. In lazy psychoanalysis the ‘speaking back’, as dissent to the analyst’s interpretation of
the needs, wishes, desires, and actions of the analysand, is simply resistance. In contemporary
democratic politics the dissent to the will of the politicians is also simply resistance: resistance to the
dominant, resistance to the majority, resistance to the will of the people, but never the less a democratic
resistance.
53 G. C. Spivak, ‘Critique’ pp. 198-311; Spivak, Reader, p.289. ‘Domesticated’ is not Spivak’s term. It
is however, aptly used by S. Seth, ‘Liberalism and the Politics of (Multi)culture: or, Plurality is not
Difference.’ Postcolonial Studies Vol.4 No.1 (2001), pp 65-77.
24
When the ‘war on terror’ was quickly enacted through the ‘war on Iraq’ there was a great deal of
‘speaking back’ to the representatives of the governments of the ‘coalition of the willing’54 and an
assertive condemnation of these voices as marginal, militant and even encouraging terrorism;55 but
nevertheless free to do so. The democratic representatives police (and arrest),56 ignore and reconstruct
the actions and voices of the protesters, but the protesters should still believe they live freely within
democracy. Or, the nation takes all their freedom, the rest they should give to themselves (via the
Middle East). Indeed, in this psychotic landscape the voice of the hysteric is barely audible and
significantly re-presented as free. The hysteric who questions what the other wants from her57, who
questions who and what she is to the Other, and who questions what this freedom is that the West
thinks its giving to the people of the Middle East, is free to express her opinions. But her opinions are
assimilated in the language and sentiment of institutional democracy as reflecting the tropes of that
democracy and subjectivised through the representation of the hegemonic assertion of the desired
liberal subject as a free subject. The subject who does regard the desires of the Other (of liberal
democracy) as known, as absolute, as complete, is likely to accept the experience of freedom in the
West as anything and everywhere, without question. The subject who questions their status as free in
the free West assumes the position of the questioning hysteric. In psychoanalysis this is regarded as a
‘normal’, or what one might call ‘healthy’, position, but it is no accident that the ‘hysteric’ has taken on
a social significance as difficult, demanding and often ‘mentally ill’ in the contemporary West. A
psychotic West has become more palatable.
54 This is specifically in reference to the demonstrations/ protests/rallies held in many nations
identifying ‘with the US’ and participating in the invasion of Iraq.
55 PM John Howard’s response to the marches in Australia was that they would encourage terrorism as
they effectively condoned, in Howard’s opinion, the actions of Saddam Hussain.
56 At a rally protesting the ‘war in Iraq’ in Sydney, Australia, a permit was denied for the protest; police
presence was overwhelming and described by journalists as a ‘Think Blue Line’. Several protestors
were arrested when they attempted to cross this line in an effort to reach government buildings and
arguably, get an effect, of their ‘free speech’. ‘Thick Blue Line Works to Keep the Peace’, Sydney
Morning Herald April 3, 2003.
57 Women tend to be (not insignificantly) more often diagnosed as ‘hysterics’. This too poses a
question (or two), but one beyond the parameters of this article.
25
In group object relations psychoanalysis58 however, the hysteric, or indeed any subject who speaks (and
is not simply adhering to their own psychotic meanings), is regarded as speaking both their own needs
and desires, and the ‘truth’ of the group. The person who questions the performance, parameters or
methodology of the group is regarded as one who speaks for the group as much as for themselves. They
are regarded as speaking that which needs to be spoken in the group, and can thus be regarded as the
voice for the group, at that time. Any disruption to the ‘givenness’ of the group is likely not to be well
received however. Disruption and dissention challenges the very being of the group – who the
members of the group qua group itself, take themselves to be. Disruption suggests “there is more out
there we don’t know” and dissention suggests “there is more in here we don’t know”. In Lacanian
terms, these questions point to lack. Thus, the speaker is likely to speak these ‘truths’ surreptitiously,
or without assertiveness, and they are unlikely to, at least initially, gain the support of the majority.
The hysteric, who poses questions to the Other, takes up precisely this disruptive and seemingly
marginal position. Listening to and responding to the hysteric is precisely an undemocratic
methodology however. One member of the group can influence dramatically the processes of the
group. This person, because they are usually speaking against and disrupting the status quo of the
group, is generally not well regarded, that is, they are unlikely to be elected to anything by the group.
When the hysteric speaks her ‘questions’ it is largely the facilitator/ consultant/ therapist to the group
whose role it is to allow these questions to be heard - to be thought about - particularly if the groups
capacity is disabled by trauma(s). Indeed, it is thoughtful facilitation of a group which may prevent the
group falling further into the trauma of the question, or indeed falling further into the paranoid-schizoid
position and projecting the terror/badness ‘out there’. It is the maintenance of the question as a
question, rather than an attack, which enables what we could call a less psychotic relation of the subject
to its own subjection, to its/others intersubjective parameters. It is the gesture of Max’s Mother, a
gesture of care, understanding, compassion qua ‘supper’ (and not just that one time) which may prevent
Max from falling into psychosis.
58 Largely developed through the work of Wilfred Bion and practitioners and theorists from the
Tavistock Institute, London. W. Bion, Attention and Interpretation: a Scientific Approach to Insight in
Psycho-analysis and Groups (Tavistock Publications, London, 1970).
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A: Conclusions
In popular Western discourse, the hysteric is generally regarded as the woman who needs to be slapped
or drugged; the person who is beyond societal convention (even if only for a moment) and requires
medical, if not military, attention. The contemporary emphasise on freedom as had through the
conditions of possibility for purchase, the representation of free choice - as opposed to forced choice -
within democracy, and the given of the gift of freedom to the Middle East, is disrupted by the question
of the hysteric to the Other. The question of what this freedom is that is had, or what it is to be free in
democracy. The psychotic’s relation to the Other, in respect to freedom, knows, or believes, that this
freedom is beyond question; that freedom is to be had in the possible possession of jeans, cars, perfume
etc. The psychotic’s freedom is simply being free as a trope of Western democracy. The psychotic
believes it has freedom to give, even though the democratic nation takes its freedom.
Democracy and socio-psychoanalysis both (mis)recognise the relation of the subject to its freedom
through an articulation of the dominant - of the heard - as the all. West may be psychotic in believing
that he has freedom to give, but his subjectivity is only a partial representation of the subject. The
uncomfortable ‘speaking back’ of the hysteric displays, not only the possibility of not all subjects
relating to freedom through psychosis, but the possibility of not all subjects relating as if they have
freedom in the democratic West, as if they’re freedom is always already a question. While the
psychotic hears the Other say ‘no, you ain’t nothin’ Honey if you ain’t free!’ and supper comes in the
form of rewards for compliance and warlike enthusiasm, the hysteric can hold the question of their
being free. How long they can hold it in the face of the terror of the nation’s leaders, splitting
goodness/badness and life/death without ambivalence, is quite another question. And this is indeed
something to be thought about.
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