The military draft and the perverse father

The military draft and the perverse father

When I went to the draft in my country as 18 year old, I remember, that most people that sat there wore jeans with holes in them, and looked especially sloppy and ragged. It was clear, that they had dressed for the occasion, hoping that if they looked too miserable, they wouldn’t have to draw a number and risk getting drafted. When I went to pull the number (only one out of 10 was drafted) the woman behind the counter tried obsessionally to convince me that IF I got a lower number, that meant that I was drafted, I shouldn’t despair, it would be a great way to get some fresh air and meet new friends. She did not mention the duty to one’s country, the notion of a paternal symbolic authority,, a ‘higher cause’, that could qualify as what psychoanalyst calls the “Name-of-the-Father”. What mattered was my personal well-being and self-development. To learn something about yourself, maybe much more than a trip around the globe. This was in the 2000ies and I remember almost everyone I was in the waiting room with got rejected as ‘unfit’. I also remember that in school to go to the draft was something you should only do, if you really wanted to, if it seemed meaningful to you. Some people went to volunteer, to get a ‘great experience’, something along the lines of taking a trip to discover yourself around the globe. As the philosopher Alain Badiou says, today, no one could, in France, dream of ‘sacrificing themselves’ for the nation, as what would go against their well-being and the pleasures of the ‘human animal’, reduced, for Badiou, the pursuit of pleasure without any capability of fidelity to an Event, that interrupts the vicious circle of status quo. As an example Badiou mentions, the military draft itself is not about sacrifice, but about self-realisation, a pursuit of pleasure, rather than of duty.

Wednesday 10th of May, a new study from the Danish Department of Defence, showed that 58 percent of danish young men are rejected from the pole of the military draft as ‘unfit’. This number of young men, that cannot go through the 3 months of training due to health issues, has been growing since the 1995, where it was 30 percent. The draft in Denmark involves 3 months of very light military training, much easier than any regular job, so that over half the male population is unfit of course worries the Deparment of Defence. The increase in number of the ‘unfit’ for military service is, according to evaluation made by Department of Defense’s own surveys, due to the rise in diagnoses of adhd, anxiety and depression and obesity.

This fits well with how Badiou characterised it, a longer quote about the decline in the symbolic initiation into adulthood through the army:

“The issue of war is very important here. In modern times, the times ushered in by the French Revolution, the state’s part in the sons’ initia­tion was symbolized by the figure of the soldier. That has become completely foreign to us for some years now. But it was a major factor for 200 years. Military service: that was the initiatic break. It brought the boys together and, in so doing, made a radical distinction between them and the girls. ‘This was a first, necessary stage of identity. Second, it gave shape and discipline to aggression. It recognized its usefulness; it did not simply suppress aggression but disciplined it and constructed a right to violence. Finally, it recon­ciled the officer-father and the soldier-son under a symbol: they both saluted the flag, that colorful embodiment of transcendence. Military service was part of the dialectical configuration I began with: the disciplined preservation of aggression carried to the extreme of the right to murder; repressive symbolism and complete submission; reconciliation, at least on the surface, in the form of “sons of the homeland.” As an institution — like every institution, horrible and stupid, but functional military service provided a laiciza­tion of archaic filiation rites. The son was subject to military service, after which came an occupa­tion and a family, and then he was an adult.

The consequences of the abolition of compul­sory military service have not been faced well. Abolishing it was probably inevitable, in an imperialistic France shorn of its military glory, reduced to the rank of a middling power, and anxious not to spend too much. Along the same lines, symbolic equality was no longer defined by patriotic death and its emblems but only by the triviality of money. And, in fact, not a single bourgeois can still imagine having to die, as an officer, for France. This is why there is, symboli­cally, no ruling class anymore. There is just an irresponsible oligarchy. So the army, contrary to Jaures’s hopes before World War I (he was against a professional army and for an army composed exclusively of citizen soldiers, organized exclu-· sively for defense), is just a bunch of mercenaries now.” (Badiou 64–66).

Isn’t this a perfect way to articulate Lacan’s statement: ‘father or worse?’ To take my own example of the draft, there was simply no ‘archaic initiation’ here, “not a single bourgeois imagining himself having to die for the country”, on the contrary there was, ‘the law of the market’, that is to realise yourself as a conscious consumer.

On the one hand, we had military draft in the epoch of the Name-of-the-Father. Here, the military was a duty. You could complain all you wanted, but you simply had to go. Today, and I remember this from the ‘sentiment’ around my own draft, you should only go ‘if you really want to’, if it seemed meaningful to you. The problem is that, as Slavoj Zizek has described often, that the ‘doing what you want’, as opposed to duty under the Name-of-the-Father, turns the pursuit of pleasure itself into a duty. It is enjoyment commanded by the Superego, rather than the symbolic Name-of-the-Father. Whereas the Name of the Father introduces a cut and also a limit, the paradox is that the superego is without limits and therefore much harsher to defy. The commandment to enjoy, makes it impossible to find pleasure at all in anything. Zizek gives the telling example of a small boy, who has to go his grandmother’s birthday. A traditional father-figure would say: “I don’t care how you feel, you simply have to go”. The boy mayl cry, complain etc, but as such the obedience is simply external, a result of symbolic command. As ZIzek points out, a ‘modern’, antiauthoritarian father, however, would say, “It is your grandmother’s birthday, but you should only go if you really want to. I do not want to force you. Nevertheless, your grandmother loves you…”. Far from a being a situation between law and free choice, the law in the second option takes on the disguise of a free choice, so that not only must you go to your grandmother’s birthday, you must also really ‘want to’. The easiest way to bear this burden is therefore precisely to ‘want to’ and experience this as your free choice. The problem of the ideology of “free choice”, heralded as the highest good in permissive-liberal democracies, is that my own choices seems all the more weighty to me, as though I am personally responsible for my own enjoyment. There is no simply opposition of pleasure and duty. In the first example duty and pleasure are opposed, whereas in the second option, the pleasure itself (really wanting to go, or really not wanting to go, to define and realise this pleasure becomes a duty itself). The military draft today takes on this aspect of ‘going to grandmother’s birthday’, let yourself be drafted, but only if you really want to. You could get drafted, but if you do, it is really your own choice, no one is forcing anything. On the other hand, it is also your own choice if you do not want to go, which means you shouldn’t just waste the time, but make something useful with it, be effective with your time etc. This problem was pointed out by the marxist Fredric Jameson in a slightly different context, where he said the absence of the effective draft would simply lead to paramilitary companies, that did our wars for us (so that we get the ideology of substance-free enjoyment): we can go to war, but without the disturbing causalities. This was Jameson’s provocative claim, that therefore a socialist utopia should re-universalize the draft. The problem with Jameson’s option is that it relies on the army as part of of what Hegel called our Sittlickeit, the substance of society, that simply cannot be questioned, and this is precisely the aspect that has changed in relation to the draft. Furthermore, the army needs an external enemy, and this clearly is problematic from an emancipatory point of view, where as Marx said, as soon as the workers identify with the nation, rather than class-struggle, capitalism has already won. It is therefore hard to see how Jameson’s “american utopia” could work.

Of course, the days of the “father” and military as duty are gone, and the edifice on which it relied of the Name-of-the-Father, was as Lacan points out, already a symptom, already a defence against the impossibility of pursuing pleasure without obstacles. The paradox is, that precisely because the Name-of-the-Father prohibits pleasure, this signifier also enables pleasure to be the opposite of duty. There are many movies in Denmark from the 1950ies about the softening of the paternal Name. They are usually comedies, people are still drafted, but the sergeant is made fun of the entire time, and the soldiers are always warm individuals that constantly escape duty to pursue their own pleasure (a girl in the nearby town), or blow up a bridge for the fun of it. At the same time, they always voice their dreams and fantasies as the opposite of military duty (like being a carpenter, once military training is over…). The movies are silly and vulgar, but entirely within the ideology of the post world war ‘pathological narcissism’. That is to say, for example, when the sergeant gives an order, some private farts, and thereby ruin the seriousness of the army. The ideology here is that we must never mistake the warm real human person for his symbolic title, behind every uniform there is simply a man. We can see here the shift from symbolic Ego-Ideal, some larger community I identify with (like the Nation), to the ideal-ego (a certain image of how I like to see myself, a warm human being with my passions and weaknesses….).

We see something very different today, for example, in the prize-winning documentary Armadillo (Janus Metz, 2010), that follows a group of Danish soldiers in Afghanistan. The camps have various viking names, such as “Valhalla”, and this mode of identification is therefore a reactionary attempt to try and return to the father, by inventing cultural roots, that have no hold in reality, The name of viking Gods and so on merely highlight the ersatz-fathers, totally out of place in the Afghan desert and the history of the vikings is not really that common knowledge in Denmark to begin with. This was also the time, when precisely in lieu of the absent symbolic Father (a common frame of reference) all soldiers began to grow a ‘viking beard’, so that the ‘foreclosure of the symbolic Father’, had to return in the real (in the body in form of the ‘masculine’ beard of a viking, or tattoos with runes etc.). More importantly, the soldiers, when they first arrive in Afghanistan make mock-ironic references to various movies about Vietnam-war. When two soldiers have to cross a river, one says ‘Welcome to Nam’’. The soldiers also repeatedly mention the phrase from Apocalypse Now “I love the smell of Napalm in the mourning”. The war, in other words, and the soldiers motif for signing up for it, is highly mediated through cinema and a cynical approach, that war is not some heroic enterprise. Yet, this is precisely where the trauma for many of the soldiers is: they do not expect the kind of ‘heroic’ war, where you face an honourable opponent, but they do expect the ‘absurdity’ of war, at least something that happens (even if its dropping napalm, so you can say “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”). What the soldiers are faced with is instead a terrifying absence of action. There is no clear enemy to fight or even bomb. Occasionally there is a mine or soldier gets shot by sniper from a village, but they never actually catch the terrorist, but only more and more frustrated encounter peasants or farmers, that claim to know nothing. As the months go by, the soldiers complain more and more of the embarrassment of not having ‘released a single shot’. The commanders grow weary, since the soldiers are completely anxious, precisely by the lack of action and especially retaliation for the the occasional mine or shot fired from a village. When they get information about members of Al-Quada, they order planes to come and strike, which results in the feeling that the soldiers are technologically superior, but for all that much more exposed to anxiety. They are prepared for ‘the smell of napalm in the morning’, for the absurdity of Vietnam-like war, but not for the inertia of having to argue how much money a peasant should have since an airstrike, totally out of proportion to the supposed terrorist hiding in a cave, has now killed the said peasant’s sheep. What is anxiety-provoking is the very “unheroic” every-day life. Recognition, anxious about possible snipers you can’t strike back at.

At night the soldiers play the videogame counterstrike or watch porn, or talk to their parents on skype or the phone, so the entire ‘war’ seems like an obscene summercamp (completely at odds with the heroic confrontation with the enemy under the symbolic Name-of-the-Father (for ‘Democracy’!). Again the absence of a symbolic frame of the war, makes it return as a hallucinatory real: on the one hand purely imaginary (like a summercamp: you can hang out with your friends and play videogames), and on the other the intrusion of the Real (mines, snipers…).

A particular traumatic point for the soldiers is when, the military commanders desperate to appease the feeling of boredom and terror mixed in the camp, finally locate some ’terrorists’ in a pit, either wounded, probably, by an air-strike already, so the soldiers are again disappointed and embarrassed to go back to Denmark having had causalities without themselves releasing a single shot. The military commanders, knowing that this particular unit of around 30 men, have to return to Denmark soon, and afraid of the mood of boredom and anxiety (the anxiety that results from boredom), tells the soldiers to go to the pit and shoot at the terrorist, that might be either wounded or corpses to ’to get a feeling of combat’. The very same night, one of the soldiers tell his mother, over Skype, who is sitting in her house back in Denmark, that finally they shot someone, a terrorist, but that unfortunately, they were probably already wounded, and it was pretty meaningless. This hits the newspapers immediately and the next day the colonel of the camp summon all soldiers to be present in the court-yard, where he asks, in what is no doubt one of the most paradigmatic scenes of the film: “ok, who called his mum and told her that we shot a terrorist that was already dead or wounded?”. When no one steps out, he then scolds the soldiers for telling their mums about what happens in war, and that what happens in Afghanistan is not to be shared with parents the same evening on Skype. The feeling of this entire sequence is that of a pornographic-like obscenity: the combination of dead soldiers, collectively emptying magazines in wounded bodies, watching porn or playing counterstrike, then talking to their mothers on skype… It seems like another step beyond the meaninglessness of the Vietnam war, because even there, people did not skype their mothers about ‘napalm in the morning’, or could play counterstrike to combat the feeling of anxiety. What emerges from the scenes is almost like an explosion of the material substance of jouissance, not blocked by anything, invasive in relationships between the soldiers and their families (the crying on skype), the porn, the fake shooting, the airstrikes… Renata Salecl writes on the way that a way to combat anxiety in the epoch of the loss of the Name-of-the-Father (some higher cause for which to fight) is the camaraderie amongst the soldiers. The soldiers identify horizontally or with their immediate commander, not with a higher purpose. Yet, this every attempt at camaraderie of a shared transgression (shooting the dead terrorist) is also ruined, since one of the soldiers call his mother on skype. No wonder, that many of the soldiers, returning to Denmark, develop traumas, from not having experienced any action, and yet being invaded by the terrorist Other, that can strike from the inside (a mine or from the nearby village). Everything new in this warfare, could be summarised simply by the sentence of a colonel asking his soldiers in the middle of a war: “ok, who called his mum on skype and said we all shot a peasant that was already dead!?” — the combination of violence and comedy-like summercamp scolding ‘who called his mum?’ is beyond any tragic sacrifice for a higher Cause, or even the ’senseless death’ of a sentence such as ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’. There is not even the space for proper evil a la Mr. Kurtz that succumbs in the ‘heart of darkness’ in Apocalypse Now. The documentary itself in its filter and editing takes on a tone that borrows from Apocalypse Now.

In response some soldiers claim, that the ‘terrorist’ was not really dead, ‘I saw him move at first…’, ‘It’s better to be sure…’, as though the problem is not really telling ‘your mum’ what happens in the middle of war as it happens, but that the facts were wrong… It is hard to imagine a more revelatory and obscene scene of the ‘unheroic’ nature of modern media-reliant warfare. We can imagine today even live-streaming one’s friends or parents with a go-pro camera… Fredric Jameson already noted how the descriptions of warfare in the Vietnam war echoed the postmodernist movement of language-games. But another ‘turn of the screw’ is definitely reached when the war is filmed and commented on directly, like a live-streaming event, and this might be what we are heading for.

The paradox, often noted by psychoanalysis is, that the duty, the ‘higher ideal’ that you have to follow no matter your personal feelings, enables the dialectics of transgression and desire to stabilise. So, what when this ‘duty’ is gone, and your pleasure becomes your duty? And like telling yourself to go sleep over and over makes it impossible to sleep/enjoy at all. It seems that the Department of Defence, like the danish churches reacted in the same panicky way, when they, faced with the increasing number of unfit and weakening of the paternal name, simply cut down the training to 3 months and made it extremely light (most of my friends gained weight in the military, never saw a gun and smoked weed most of the time). It is clear that in the Department of Defence they were much more horrified by the crumbling of the symbolic status (people declaring themselves unfit for training). I remember that practically any doctor would, faced with a young person who wanted to diagnose, simply write out one, so that they didn’t have to go to the draft. The point was of course, that the mere fact that you ‘could’ have your doctor exempt you from duty, meant that the draft was de facto a choice. This means that draft itself, perhaps the last relic of the Name-of-the-Father, immediately succumbed to the logic of consumerist society of choice (and the new kinds of tyranny this proliferation of choice involves). The problem is that getting rid of the father-figure and the “Ego-ideal”, the symbolic frame, that constitutes the ‘sovereign Good’ of a community does not lead to a liberation of pleasure-seeking sons. Immediately, when you are supposed to deliberate if you want to join the draft or not, as a personal choice, it turns into the ‘duty towards your own pleasure’. This makes it impossible to enjoy, since enjoyment is enabled by the law. Without the law of prohibition, there is no way that enjoyment can mobilise itself through transgression, since enjoyment’s object is constitutively lost. When I was at one point at a foreign university, there was a ritual among the students of ‘streaking the lawn’ (that is run naked at night over some of the university ground). This was officially prohibited, but of course highly encouraged. To really belong, you ‘had’ to streak the lawn at least once. Like Zizek points out, a community is build around, not its official ideals, but its shared mode of illicit enjoyment. The problem already at this university, was that streaking the lawn seemed much more like duty, than say going to classes. To really belong you had to streak the lawn, and the law enforcement there to ‘prevent’ it, went out of their way to enable students to streak the lawn and to turn a blind eye to this ritual. The peer-pressure to streak the lawn was a perfect indication of the superego-imperative to enjoy has a much harsher command, the ‘ferocious figure’ (Lacan), than the official symbolic law.

But, of course, there is no way of turning back, since the Name-of-the-Father is itself based on an illusion, it is itself a symptom. The problem, as soon as you see this, is prohibition itself becomes a matter of personal choice, you have to act, in what philosophers call the ‘als-ob’, as if, the Name-of-the-Father is really authoritative, but this of course turns it into a ‘reflected’ matter of matter of personal choice. Like Lacan says, the phallus (symbolic authority) only functions as ‘veiled’, it can never assert itself in the open and remain authority, in this case the Name-of-the-Father is already its own caricature, already too reflected, and mediated by “the pleasure principle”. It is not really obeyed, since obedience is must follow an imperative that is unconditional. This is also why no one can take the ersatz-fathers seriously as the many military figures that pop up in Danish TV after the war in Ukraine. They are put in studios to talk about the war, themselves terribly ‘unfit’ (overweight and with antiquated Danish) in their uniforms, that seem like another program of reality tv, dressed up for the occasion. The father is always an imposture, and the imposture becomes evident, when various generals pose in their uniform in a studio right after a program about cooking. Lacan makes the point that when a man really tries to be ‘virile’ (when he tries to really identify with his uniform, for example) he also becomes curiously ‘feminine’ (that is, vain), so the more the colonels try to be ‘serious military experts’, strutting around in the uniforms in tv, the more they seem completely out of touch, the more it seems like the uniform doesn’t fit. We see the same aspect in new figures of masculinity, like body-builders that in the absence of symbolic identification try to reinforce an imaginary (mirror-like) masculinity, like oversized muscles. Also here, the more one tries to reinforce the ‘virile’ aspect, the more they seem ‘feminine’ (that is masquerading, posing…). The same is of course the case, with the aforementioned soldiers in Afghanistan that all grew beards, to be more ‘viking-like’, the more the beards grow the more it reveals the absence of a common symbolic frame, that can serve as an anchor of identification.

This also means, that becoming a soldier itself is no longer anything like a symbolic Ego-ideal, but much more the imaginary ideal-ego, (the way I would like to see myself). The Ego-ideal is not the nation (‘serving your nation, unconditionally, “King and Country”), but instead the way to ‘realise yourself’, a way where you find something meaningful in your life. We have in Denmark tv-shows about “volunteers in Ukraine”, that is people that go to the front to fight. But this fascination is already mediated through the ‘pathological narcissism’ of self-realisation in the absence of symbolic paternal authority. It is not a return to a time, when duty mattered more than mere pleasure, but rather a result of pleasure itself that seems trivial, and going to Ukraine can be a way to try and mobilise it, like the ultimate extreme sport. When Putin first invaded Ukraine, there was no shortage of people that wanted to drive to Ukraine to get refugees, and the entire altruism and humanism clearly worked to rationalise the enthusiasm of the enjoyment itself, as if now something was really happening, there was something to get up to, and care about, a bit of passion for the Real in the grey everyday (that would not lead to actual death, since most were simply driving to the border and then picking up a few refugees). The very same volunteered soldiers can return to Denmark more or less when they want to. Of course it is extremely dangerous, but the entire choice is precisely that, a choice, and therefore seems just like the more extreme version of extreme sports. Far from undermining the principle of “pursuit of pleasure”, of ‘realising yourself’ it is rather it’s most extreme version, because it is a reaction to the impasse of ‘pursuit of pleasure, when they are no prohibitions.

This also gives us the clue to another ‘father or worse’ — namely the return of patriarchs, that have very little to do with traditional patriarchy, so what we get are rather tv-patriachal perverse fathers, modelled on the tv-preacher, that preaches the sinful ways of modern man, but makes use of the most obscene modern technology and cheap dramaturgy of reality tv to gain his effects on listeners. This kind of father means the popularity of figures like Christ Tucker, Donald Trump and Andrew Tate. Despite the (occasional) claim to ‘law and order’, it is abundantly clear that it is really just the imperative to pursuit of jouissance. Badiou makes the astute point, that there are simply no sons that envy the father today, on the contrary the father tries (endlessly) to imitate the son — and that is why the new forms of patriarchy (Trump, Tate, Musk, Tucker) rather seems like porn-fixated highschool teenagers:

“The problem is that, today, this construct is being undermined on both its sides. On the side of the father, because he can only be thought with difficulty now, as both real and symbolic, at least insofar as he is seen by the son. Indeed, what I’m concerned about today is the father as seen by the son. So I can say that, as the father ofjouissance and as the father of the Law, he is a problematic figure. As far as jouissance is con­cerned, it is the father nowadays who tends to envy the son’s jouissance.” (Badiou 2017: 54).

Isn’t this abundantly clear. We talk about patriarchy all the time, but there are really no ‘classic’ patriarchs in the sense of prohibition of enjoyment, rather the patriarchs today, envy the son’s jouissance, his youth and virility (Trump’s boasts of grabbing women by the p….) is not simply obscene, it above all serves to make his followers believe that he has the virility of a young man.

This is of course also why even the jury’s’ verdict, which should shock the conservative minded voter, that Trump is liable for sexual assault on E. Jean Carrol in 1996, and is to pay 5 million dollars to her for battery and defamation, this fact, only strengthens the identification with him by his voters because the it increase the ‘enjoyment’-factor. The more useless enjoyment is, (‘how can you support Trump..?’) the more enjoyable it is, unfortunately.

This leads us to a very important point made by Slavoj Zizek vis-a-vis serbian fundamentalists, that is also at work in right-wing populism, like in the figures above (Tucker, Trump, Tate…).. As Zizek pointed out, the reading, around the Jugoslavian civil war by political thinkers, that people from ex-communist countries, resort to fundamentalism, because there too many choices in a western liberal democracy is deeply misleading. On the contrary, their choice of fundamentalism has nothing to do with anxiety about “the risk-society”. It is a choice, because the imperative “pursuit of pleasure” is followed by a long normative unwritten rules of exactly ‘how to pursue this pleasure”, which thereby turns it into a superego-command (and thereby makes pleasure impossible). First, since this pleasure is seen as the road to happiness (and happiness of the subject as the only ideal), this makes all pleasures trivial, since happiness is not, strictly speaking, a choice. You cannot really ‘opt out’ of happiness, it seems like a forced choice, but this of course renders invisible the psychoanalytical point point that a subject is not in pursuit of happiness, or even its own well-being to begin with, and that happiness is itself a highly ideological category, (happiness through consumption of certain commodities etc.). On the contrary, the imperative of happiness puts an incredible burden on a choice on the subject, so that, as Renata Salecl has excellently demonstrated this engenders a new industry of new masters that should ‘help with the choice’, ‘relieve me of the choice’. This is the passage from the prohibitive father to the modern ‘coach’, that helps you realise your potential. The illusion is of course, and a very profitable one, that there really is ‘expertise’ out there, that can help you with the choice, which is why you can move from one coach to the next, and each coach is himself under constant ‘self-development’.

The second problem, related to the first, is that the pursuit of pleasure is followed by a long range of secret injunctions, that should make enjoyment ‘responsible’ (and thereby take of its excessive sting), examples abound like political correct speech, ‘cafeeine-free coffee’, alcohol-free beer. That is to say, we are told to enjoy, but without the dangerous substance of enjoyment, that could hurt others or ourselves. As all the alcohol-commercials like to put it: “drink responsibly” (which of course is totally at odds with the depicted content of the commercial, which rather depicts rapture and excessive enjoyment, like a man in a party surrounded by women…). Isn’t the ongoing fascination about the young drug-addict (like in recent fears about Fentanyl in media) precisely about a subject, that could precisely follow the superego-injunction to enjoy without concern for ‘responsibility’, that precisely realises an enjoyment with the dangerous substance. The rest of us are both horrified and fascinated with the fentanyl crisis, because it both shows an enjoyment without limits to our well-being, but also what ‘normal’, enjoyment-free enjoyment has to feed on in order to sustain itself. To put it simply, we could not even enjoy alcohol-free beer, if there was not somewhere someone who did drink beer WITH alcohol. Zizek made the provocative, but very insightful claim, that the serbian fundamentalist precisely were suffocated with all the norms, with the purging of enjoyment, that followed the imperative to enjoy, and one is tempted to say the same goes for the hard-core drug-addict. You are obligated to enjoy (but don’t be sexist, racist, don’t smoke). As a member of Milosevich’s government claimed, Milosevich re-enabled people to enjoy precisely by reinstating a prohibition (’Serbians first’). You could mock Clinton on TV, you could carry a gun in the street, you could participate in war crimes in Bosnia — it was as this MP put it a ‘festival’. We can see from this example, that right-wing populism and fascism is not at all some ‘return to of stern fathers, that prohibit enjoyment, but the opposite, entirely mediated through the imperative to enjoy. The official slogans of “law and order” are merely there to enable the enjoyment to function. We can of course see the same about Putin: isn’t it that behind the official claims of defending the ‘family’, or Russian sovereignty, Putin is precisely saying this: obey a few rules here in Russia like censorship lack of democracy, and you may do what you want in Ukraine. This is also why the Wagner group is not simply an abomination within the war, but in a very its highest principle, the army itself as a para-military hooligan unit.

We get another example of this in football-fans who started a new trend, with that of ‘swarming the pitch’ to celebrate with the players. It is hard not to read this as a symptom of the many efforts to clean out racism, sexism, violence and so on among fans, that is precisely to ‘enjoy without excessive enjoyment’ (forgetting that enjoyment is as such excessive). This weekend, when Napoli won the championship in the serie A, the fans immediately stormed the pitch, since they were ‘encouraged’ to celebrate with the players (but of course on condition that they stay on their own side of the pitch, in the fan section). The players and manager was horrified when the fences broke down, a perfect example of when the imaginary other (the semblable, my fellow man, someone like me,) turns into a monstrous Neighbour, that is by definition overproximate with his obscene jouissance. But wasn’t this also simply an attempt on the fans side to ‘connect’ with a proper enjoyment, that is precisely the enjoyment with risk, like a panic-ridden search for some prohibition. If the championship was really ‘enough’, there would be no need to storm the fences. It was clearly some search for a prohibition that could be crossed (and then excused by the irrational passion of the victory). Needless to say, this ‘pure enjoyment’, turns immediately into a spectacle itself, since all fans try to get selfies with the player, that is to ‘capture the moment’. It stands as a paradigm of our time, to see the the hooligan jumping the fence with his newest iPhone, so that the same ‘passion for the Real’ (Badiou), immediately turns into a semblance, that is into a psychotic (lack of) society of the spectacle. Against Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, one is tempted to say, that we live in an increased psychotic state, that is, to say there is a spectacle, but no society, since the psychotic structure is defined by the dispersion and lack of unifying signifiers. There is no coherent father-figure, that stabilises and prohibits enjoyment, but instead only perverse fathers that seek to channel them. The narrative around Napoli’s victory was that it football is especially important here in the south of Italy, since people are poor and have little else to hope for. The paradox is that while countless journalist are in Napoli to ‘capture the atmosphere’, this is again, supposed to be without dangerous enjoyment, but with the symptomatic liberal hope, that some riot will break out, so that we can feed on the real substance of enjoyment. The same liberal-permissive media is then horrified-enjoying when the ‘rules are broken’, when this passion becomes too much, as though we got a small dose of the Real in the middle of universalised semblance.

Lacan a.o. do not want to return to the ‘father’, which was always an illusion anyway. It is not a prescriptive claim, but much more a call to thinking, do not think that the downfall of the traditional father will lead to unbridled pleasure, on the contrary it is the emergence of a much harsher superego, and this latter is much harder to defend yourself against. There is even a dispute amongst Lacanians themselves here, say between Pierre Legendre’s call for some function of the Name-of-the-Father and others like Zizek:

“…if the symbolic Law (God-the-Father) loses its authority — i.e. if there is no prohibition — desire itself (sustained by the prospect of transgressing it) vanishes — this is why permissiveness kills desire. Along these lines, Pierre Legendre and some other Lacanians claim tha that the problem today is the decline of God-the-Father, of the paternal symbolic authority: in its absence, pathological narcissism explodes, evoking the spectre of the primordial Real Father. Consequently, we should try to restore some kind of Law as the agent of prohibition.” (Zizek: 209).

Zizek of course rejects this option. As I described above it is also impossible, since there is simply no going back to traditional function of prohibition. It will be an ‘as-if’ prohibition, as ‘if there really is a paternal symbolic authority, that you have to obey’. What this options fails to see, is that obedience, in order for the Name-of-the-Father to function it must be sustained by the illusion, that it is not simply a symbolic fiction, but grounded in some pre-mediated Real.

Many psychoanalysts believe that today we are dealing much more with a clinical structure of psychosis, since psychosis is defined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. This means, like with Freud’s classic study on the judge Paul Schreber, that the father returns in the real (as a harasser), we might say that for the russians it is either Putin (the benevolent, protective father of the nation, the Ego-ideal), or Jevgenij Prigozjin, the obscene father of jouissance, the Superego, of the Wagner-group. When working with psychotics the problem is not that of pointing to symptom as a problem, that the ego is alienated, and that the imaginary and symbolic identification must be dissolved. In psychosis the work consist much more in strengthening the identifications of the ego. The other day I met a man on the plane that talked excessively about his ‘fantastic smoothie’, that he was making in Mallorca. It was clear from other things he said, that he financed himself not from making his smoothie, but by working as a regular bartender. He used to be a criminal, he told me, but the ‘fantastic smoothie’, with a unique recipe, was what got him out of crime, now he wanted to have the patent to the recipe. From Badiou’s perspective this is of course the difference between the ‘perverted body’ (that is the body devoted to violence and transgression) to the body of ‘merit’, (that is the body that can work under neoliberalism, that can be productive…). Only Badiou’s categories do not function so clear-cut, since the same subject easily slip in and out of the different ‘body’ as it were. One can easily be a ‘perverted body’ in the weekends, and a ‘body of merit’ as a stock broker doing the week. A woman said overhearing the conversation, that even if the smoothie was very special, it would be impossible to uphold the patent. He of course did not take that in. ‘Objective reality’ doesn’t count, what matters is the way that the smoothie functioned for him as his own ‘sinthome’, that is as a condensed form of enjoyment and minimum hold of an identity, of what would otherwise be fragmented and disorganised. More and more people are in the situation of the man with the smoothie. If he is neurotic, we might ask what particular lie the smoothie embodies, and try to dissolve the fixation on it, whereas with the late Lacan, the problem, if he had a psychotic structure, would rather be that of ‘identifying’ with the ‘sinthome’ (the smoothie). It doesn’t matter, for example if the smoothie is not ‘objectively good’, or how it serves as a misrecognition and alienation through his ego, truth does not matter, since the entire problem of universal truth is already problematic without the Name-of-the-Father as a guarantor of symbolic order. Instead, each subject lives with their own sinthomes, and the problem for the clinician is how to make the patient’s life functional, not to remove all delusions, say, how this project of the smoothie gave the man on the plane some minimal coordinates in how to ‘orient’ himself, in, to use Badiou’s phrase, an increasingly atonal world.To go back to the start, the draft under the Name of the Father enables ’neurosis’, that is the castration under the prohibitive Father. Or as Lacan says, there is a transition from the truth to its sister, jouissance. If someone comes to the clinic today is much more because of troubles with jouissance, than because of ’troubles with truth’. The neurotic’s problem is that unconsciously he doesn’t accept this castration and continues to believe in an uncastrated Other. But this castration is not enacted by the psychotic, who is on the contrary flooded with too-much-jouissance. Since our ‘common frame’ of reference, the Name-of-the-Father is all the more in decline, we will see an increase in such a flooding of jouissance, in psychosis, where each has to construct their own ‘islands of jouissance’ without disturbing the other too much.

Bibliography:

Badiou, Alain, and Susan Spitzer. The True Life: A Plea for Corrupting the Young. Polity Press, 2017.

Jameson, Fredric, and Slavoj Žižek. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. Verso, 2016.

Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998. Verso, 2009.

Lacan, Jacques, et al. The Sinthome: / The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book Xxiii. Polity, 2016.

Lacan, Jacques. Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book v. Polity Press, 2020.

Salecl, Renata. On Anxiety. Routledge, 2006.

Salecl, Renata. The Tyranny of Choice. Profile, 2011.

Žižek, Slavoj. Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.