Abstract
Using as a starting point R.D. Hinshelwood's argumentation in ‘Ideology and Identity,’ this commentary aims at exploring what exactly psychoanalytic theory can offer today to the contemporary analysis of ideology. Through a systematic reconstruction and critique of the main hierarchical oppositions operating in Hinshelwood's approach – individual vs group life, constructive vs destructive group, truth/reality vs falsity – we point towards an alternative psychoanalytic orientation located beyond individualism, representationalism, objectivism, and (instrumental) rationalism. This orientation is articulated on the basis of Lacan's work on the symbolic, fantasy, and enjoyment.
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Notes
Since this is primarily a commentary, for the most part I have tried to introduce my own take on ideology indirectly through the critique of Hinshelwood's argument. However, this critique will culminate in a brief ‘programmatic’ conclusion, where the reader will also be directed to further reading material.
Which, obviously, does not mean that they understand all these terms in exactly the same manner.
See, in this respect, Althusser's ‘Freud and Lacan’ and ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Althusser, 1984, 1996), Laclau's New Reflections (Laclau, 1990), and Žižek's Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 1989) as well as his edited collection, Mapping Ideology (Žižek, 1995).
Fortunately, this orientation has been more than visible in the only existing international journal focusing on the study of ideology, the Journal of Political Ideologies, through the publication of numerous relevant articles throughout the last few years.
Using Chantal Mouffe's (2005) terminology, one could envisage this regulation as a sublimation of raw antagonism into symbolically mediated agonism.
A brief note on terminology is necessary at this point: what exactly can be the benefit of using a term originating from a bacterial model of infection to describe processes of unconscious identification? Leader and Corfield have shown how misleading such metaphors can be even in discussing the psychical dimensions of illness (Leader and Corfield, 2007, p. 191).
See Stavrakakis (1999, Chapter 2) for a detailed account of the functioning of the point de capiton/nodal point in ideological capitonnage and Stavrakakis (1997b) for an application of this orientation in the analysis of a concrete ideological discourse, Green Ideology.
Hinshelwood himself implicitly alluded to that when he described ‘nationalism [a]s an identity grounded in a state of feeling’ (Hinshelwood, 2005, p. 161). For an analysis of nationalist ideology from the point of view of a theory of affect and Lacan's jouissance, see Stavrakakis with Chrysoloras (2006; reprinted in Stavrakakis, 2007, Chapter 6). I have explored the fantasies sustaining Green Ideology in Stavrakakis (1997c).
In Stavrakakis with Chrysoloras (2006), we analyzed nationalism from this angle also.
I have articulated this strategy of traversing the fantasy in detail, with reference to Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis and the logics of mourning and enjoyment, in Stavrakakis (1999, Chapter 5) and, more recently, in Stavrakakis (2007, Chapter 8).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Lynne Layton and Jason Glynos for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Stavrakakis, Y. Psychoanalysis and ideology: Comment on R.D. Hinshelwood. Psychoanal Cult Soc 14, 149–163 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.40