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National finitude and the paranoid style of the one

Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

This article inquires into the clinical figure of paranoia and its constitutive role in the articulation of the nation-state discourse in Europe, uncovering a central tension between a principle of integrity and a dualist spatial configuration. A conceptual distinction between ‘border’ (finis) and ‘frontier’ (limes) will help to expose the political effects of such a tension, unveiling the way in which a solid and striated organisation of space has been mobilised in the topographic antagonism of the nation, sustaining the phantasm of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient finitude.

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Notes

  1. Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas’, Augustine, De Vera Religione (39, 72).

  2. This inability to operationalise symbolic mediation is associated to the complete rejection of symbolic castration in psychosis: ‘something primordial regarding the subject’s being does not enter into symbolization and is not repressed, but rejected’ (Lacan, 1955–56 [1993], p. 81). Instead of neurotic ‘repression’, we have here a ‘rejection’ to ‘all means of access’ to castration and to the register of the symbolic function (Lacan, 1955–56 [1993], p. 13). Symbolic castration figures for Lacan as the intrinsic logic of language itself. Hence, what is at stake in paranoia is a ‘collision with the inassimilable signifier’ (Lacan, 1955–56 [1993], p. 321).

  3. Although Freud’s insights into mass psychology have been widely contested over time, his work is not being appealed here as a model for understanding complex collectives in general. Unlike a widespread psychoanalytic tendency, we do not take the solid and exclusionary structure of paranoia as a constitutive feature of mass psychology as such. New investigations in the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis, for instance, have recently highlighted the ‘liquid’ and ‘perverse’ character that contemporary mass psychology has come to assume in advanced capitalist societies, reflecting a new type of cynical, narcissistic and anti-institutional social bond (Recalcati, 2007b). Freud’s work is referred to in this article as an example of the kind of paranoid logic informing ‘discourses’ on national collectives in that specific period, though we still believe that such analyses were particularly coherent with the historical form that those same collectives came to assume in a context of exacerbated nationalism and incipient totalitarianism.

  4. Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem’, Ovid, Fasti, II, 682–683.

  5. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio’, Horace, Book II, Epistle I, lines 156–157.

  6. Although we endorse the idea of frontier in opposition to borders and assume the former as a desirable model for thinking the political construction of territorial and cultural boundaries in a global context, we shall differentiate our notion of frontier from ‘imperial’ alternatives within capitalistic processes. At stake is a fundamental distinction between the conceptualisation of frontier in a neurotic space as elucidated above, and concurrent variants epitomised by the topographic image of the sea, as first elaborated by Schmitt, or the notion of frontier first discussed by Turner, once subsumed within the logic of advanced capitalism. These imperial liminal figures seem to refer to the articulation of a ‘smooth global space’, where lines and differences are ‘regimented in global networks of power consisting of highly differentiated and mobile structures’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 151). The topography of capital in this regard is one of pure liquidity, a smooth space allowing for the ultimate suspension of the experience of the limit. Lines here assume a purely fictitious character, denoting a pervert organisation of social space, which works through the veiling of social and normative limits and the denial of symbolic castration (Melman, 2002). A neurotic understanding of the frontier would instead favour the symbolic inscription of immanent and contingent lines, putting the ex-centric and ambivalent condition of the subject at work. This means realising an inclusive social dynamics based on a logic of permeability, and temporal and spatial processuality. Such a differentiation – for all its attendant complexities and ambiguities – exceeds the scope of this article, but remains a crucial task ahead.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 249379.

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Mura, A. National finitude and the paranoid style of the one. Contemp Polit Theory 15, 58–79 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.23

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