Would it be an exaggeration to say that in the unconscious there is necessarily less cruelty and terror, and of a different…

“Would it be an exaggeration to say that in the unconscious there is necessarily less cruelty and terror, and of a different type, than in the consciousness of an heir, a soldier, or a Chief of State? The unconscious has its horrors, but they are not anthropomorphic. It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”

–

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 112

Thinking about this in relation to Trump and the problem of labelling - or rather, psychopathologizing - him as a ‘narcissist’, and other terms up to ‘raving lunatic’ (which, rightly, one cannot say). The idea that what’s wrong with Trump is somehow internal to him, and not related to the economic and political system which produced him ( quafree-speaker, ’parrhesiast’) and which he ostensibly rails against, seems like a dumb mistake for anyone on the left to make.

Central to Deleuze and Guattari’s text, an “introduction to the nonfascist life” in Foucault’s preface, is the question from Wilhelm Reich, “How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?” To a degree, that’s the same question being asked about Brexit, and Trump (Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment is both an example of the accusation of racism being turned around into a sign of superiority, and a bald statement of fact). The potency of ideas around ‘sovereignty’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ is not simply an appeal to base libido but the circularity of ‘psychic repression’ with ‘social repression’- although Reich “did not succeed in determining the insertion of desire into the economic infrastructure itself, the insertion of the drives into social production […] Better to depart in search of the Orgone, he said to himself, in search of the vital and cosmic element of desire, than to continue being a psychoanalyst under such conditions.”

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality. This is the other problem with the Trump-analysis - that we’ve departed from a supposed past in which politics was conducted by rational debate, not emotion and traditional positions, and that somehow ‘data’ should have made things uncontroversial. What if our problem is indeed an excess of rationality of a certain kind - economic? That’s certainly the position of André Gorz; and in An American Utopia, Fredric Jameson argues that we need to revolt against an idea of ‘efficiency’ determining our political and social lives. I haven’t read it, but the metaphor of sleep brings to mind Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.  Trump, unfortunately, is not a nightmare from which we are trying to awake - but a day-state which we cannot shake off.

(viahardcorefornerds)