Psychoanalysis; Comedy or Tragedy?

While in the middle of a psychoanalytically inspired rant the other day, I was accused of political pessimism. Psychoanalytic political theory (at least of the Zizekian variety) with its emphasis on ontological negativity is easily accused of this fault. Certainly psychoanalysis places more emphasis on negativity and its resulting effects than more traditional political ideologies, such as liberalism or conservatism. But emphasising the negative is not naturally pessimistic. Rather it can open up the possibility of much more radical results. Perhaps the difference is analogous to that between comedy and tragedy. Is it tragic that we will never find ‘it’, or rather is the joke that it was never to be lost?

Many political theorists consider psychoanalysis to be a tragic discourse; focusing on negative ontology can only lead to conservative politics. Conservative in the sense that society can never find what it is missing. It is destined to remain incomplete, with all the connotations of exclusions, violence and injustice. Indeed there is congruence between conservative and psychoanalytic thought because both consider social exclusions to be a natural occurrence. The critical difference is that where conservative thought considers these exclusions ‘natural’ and therefore fixed, radical thought always holds open the possibility of structural change, of reconfiguring socially produced symptoms. It is therefore the comedic and radical side of psychoanalysis which provides the best response to the allegation of pessimism. Comedic, in the sense that that which we have supposed to have lost was never ours to lose. Radical, because the comedic ontological interpretation opens up the possibility of change beyond reform, beyond conservatism and ultimately, ‘conservative’ liberalism.

I say conservative liberalism, because in the end it is liberalism that cannot envisage the possibility of a radically better world. Liberal ideology is shaken by the presence of exclusions; the exclusions operate as a point of anxiety. The inclusion of these points of anxiety becomes the key to justice within liberalism. Liberal ideology therefore becomes an ultimately futile process of inclusion. This process matches that of the logic of desire; one can never have enough. Perhaps this explains the synergetic association between liberalism and capitalism, but working on the infinite logic of desire. The tragedy with liberal-capitalism is that it will never find what it is looking for, but will create all kinds of carnage on the way- just ask the Third World.

By contrast, radical (psychoanalytic) thought has more in common with the logic of drive and comedy. Jouissance is not received by obtaining an object that will fill lack (or the fantasy of this process), but rather through a circulation of this lack. Drive, in this sense, has much in common with comedy, in that both acknowledge the ultimate failure of the social, not in the sense that we will never find fulfilment, but that we never had it in the first place. By acknowledging primal lack, the possibility of radical structural change is reopened.

Radical thought may appear pessimistic in the face of the liberal order- it denies the satisfaction of desire- but this negativity pushes past the boundaries of the current order to the possibility of a better one. That is why I would rather be a radical pessimism than a liberal optimism.