Abstract
The psychoanalytic contribution to our understanding of hating government and voting against our own interests can be appreciated by invoking the categories of fantasy and enjoyment. Essential to the psychoanalytic enterprise is the idea that there is no necessary relation between a subject’s investment in a fantasmatic narrative and how faithfully this narrative reflects a consensus reality. As a prominent narrative element in political discourse, ‘big government’ can thus play for the subject two analytically distinct roles: an ideological role (linked to our fantasmatic investment in the world) and an epistemological role (linked to our understanding of the world). I argue that an appeal to fantasy not only helps us better grasp this difference in roles, but also enables us to appreciate its social and political implications.
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Notes
Some Lacanian scholars, such as Slavoj Žižek, have approached this issue in terms of ‘traversing the fantasy’ (see Glynos, 2001, pp. 96-99).
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Glynos, J. Hating government and voting against one’s interests: Self-Transgression, enjoyment, critique. Psychoanal Cult Soc 19, 179–189 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.2