Vance, Dugin, Lacan
25 October 2024
Aleksandr Dugin’s influence should not be overrated: he advocates for an extreme new Eurasian empire dominated by Russian Orthodoxy through military victory, and his supporters consider Putin too soft. However, what Dugin writes should be followed as an indicator of neo-fascist dangers. In a short text from September 2024, Dugin does something that shocked even me, accustomed as I am to all kinds of surprises in theory and politics: he applies Lacan’s triad of Real/Symbolic/Imaginary to analyze the roles of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the forthcoming U.S. presidential elections. Here is how Dugin presents the triad RSI:
“The Real is the domain where every object is strictly identical to itself. This absolute identity (A=A) excludes the very possibility of becoming, i.e., of being in a state of transformation. Thus, the Real is the zone of pure death and nothingness. There are no changes, movements, or relations. The Real is true, like the truth of nothingness that has no alternatives.
The Symbolic is the domain where nothing equals itself, where one thing always refers to another. It is an escape from the Real, motivated by the desire to avoid death and falling into nothingness. It is here that content, relationships, movements, and transformations are born, but always in a dreamlike state. The Symbolic is the unconscious. The essence of a symbol is that it points to something other than itself (it does not matter what specifically, as long as it is not itself).
The Imaginary is the domain where the dynamic of the Symbolic stops, but without the object dying and collapsing into the Real. The Imaginary is what we mistakenly take for Being, the world, ourselves—nature, society, culture, and politics. It is everything, yet it is also a lie. Every element of the Imaginary is actually a frozen moment of the Symbolic. Wakefulness is a form of sleep that does not realize itself. Everything in the Imaginary refers to the Symbolic but presents itself as supposedly ‘Real.’
In the Real, A=A is true. In the Symbolic, A=A is false. In the Imaginary, no object is identical to itself, but unlike in the Symbolic, it doesn’t want to admit this—neither to itself nor to others. The Real is nothing. The Symbolic is ever-changing becoming. The Imaginary consists of false nodes of the frozen Symbolic.”
Everything is wrong in this description: what Dugin misses is precisely the interconnection of the three dimensions illustrated by the figure of the Borromean knot. The Real is not a self-identity (A=A is strictly the formula of symbolic identity) but an obstacle immanent to the Symbolic, the impossibility of A=A, of any symbolic identity fully actualizing itself. (A classic example: the Real of sexual difference means that, in a patriarchal society, a woman cannot achieve the full actualization of her potentials. Or: the Real of class antagonism means that a society is never an organic Whole.) The Symbolic itself is a system of differential identities: the identity of each element resides in its differences from other elements. In this sense, the Symbolic cannot simply be identified with the unconscious: it is primarily what Lacan calls the big Other, the socio-symbolic order that provides the basic coordinates of a society. (Along these lines, the Name-of-the-Father is a figure of the symbolic Law.) The aim of the analytic process is to bring a subject to the point at which he or she accepts that there is no big Other, that every figure of the big Other is traversed by the Real of an antagonism. The Imaginary also cannot be reduced to a frozen Symbolic: the Imaginary is also, at its most basic, what Lacan called the experience of a dismembered body (le corps morcelé), the chaotic flow of bodily parts not yet united in a body.
However, enough has been written about the triad of RSI—what we should focus on is how this applies to the forthcoming U.S. elections. In Dugin’s view, Kamala Harris represents the Symbolic; she
“embodies an invitation to transgression, the legalization of perversions, and liberation from all prohibitions and norms, i.e., the expansion of the Symbolic realm. The Democrats’ platform is a structure of well-tempered delirium: more LGBT, more cancel culture, more illegal immigrants, more drugs and gender reassignment surgeries, more deconstruction of old orders, more BLM and critical race theory.”
The Democrats’ platform is thus, in some sense, psychoanalytic: since the Symbolic is unconscious, it repeats the old Leftist-Freudian gesture of liberating the unconscious from the constraints of oppressive order. But what Lacan knew and the Leftist Freudians ignored is the basic lesson of all revolutions: when the repressed symbolic unconscious destroys the imaginary order and is set free, such a direct assertion of the unconscious immediately gives birth to a new fixed imaginary order that is much more oppressive and totalitarian than the previous order. It may appear that Dugin hit the right button against Lacano-Marxists—here is how Jacques-Alain Miller (who truly knows Lacan) replied when asked, “What were the political consequences of Jacques Lacan's teaching?”:
“Lacan said that he was not progressive, that he did not believe in progress. For him, history was rather circular, in a way. […] He was not progressive; he was not conservative, and at the same time, he did not believe in total change because he thought that if you leave a master or destroy a master, then you will find another master. We have seen that very clearly with Soviet communism, for example. Stalin was a much fiercer master than the Tsar.”
But Miller is not very original here: such a warning against radical change is an old conservative-liberal commonplace first formulated by Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. (The case of Hegel is more subtle: in his Phenomenology of Spirit, he showed how absolute freedom necessarily turns into terror, but this passage was for him a necessary step toward the establishment of civil peace.) The gap that separates Miller and Dugin appears when we pass to the next question: how are we to counteract this radical tendency frozen in a new totalitarian Imaginary? Dugin claims that the only way to really undermine Democratic delirium is to rely on right-wing symbolic delirium represented by groups like the Proud Boys and pro-Trump commentators:
“Where can we find a counterattack on the frozen liberal Imaginary, which has turned into overt totalitarianism? The answer is obvious: in the opposite pole, which we can call ‘Trumpist Symbolic.’ We saw the signs of this strategy during Trump’s first presidential campaign in the Alt-Right, on 4chan, in the figure of the meme Pepe the Frog, in reptilian conspiracy theories, chaos magic, and the delirious theories of QAnon. We might call this ‘esoteric Trumpism’ or, more precisely, ‘psychedelic Trumpism.’ If the Democrats and their transgressive practices have become the Imaginary—frozen in totalitarian prescriptive power structures—then critique from the Symbolic has naturally focused on the Republicans. Of course, not all Republicans, but the most liberated, ‘unhinged,’ and delirious factions.”
And the key figure here for Dugin is J.D. Vance, for whom he even speculates that he may be familiar with Lacan:
“In Vance, the Democrats’ psychoanalytic strategy fails, as Vance himself embodies the atypical right-wing Symbolic pole. It is even possible that he understands this and is familiar with Lacan.”
So here is where we finish: Vance as a Lacanian… The underlying political vision of Dugin that sustains such madness is not just a project of European nationalists and traditional Muslims working together against global liberalism, but also a project of the Left and Right working together against the liberal center:
“In the West, there are both excellent right-wing and very respectable left-wing figures. For instance, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) is a remarkable right-wing movement, and Sahra Wagenknecht is an outstanding leftist.”
But the split is not only between the honest, true anti-globalist Left and the globalist Left; there is a homologous split on the Right, between the true anti-globalist Right and the Right that willingly participates in the globalist liberal game:
“There are European far-right individuals who join forces with Nazis from the Azov battalion to fight against us [Russia]. These far-right individuals conveniently ignore the fact that Zelensky is a Jewish liberal clown, a drug addict, and a pervert. How can these people be considered right-wing? They are merely service dogs on the liberal NATO leash.”
The implication of these lines is clear: the utter demonization of European liberalism:
“There are no good liberals. All liberals are aligned with the world government and Western hegemony. Anyone on their side is an absolute enemy of both true right-wing and true left-wing people. This is because capitalism is pure evil and must be destroyed from both the right and the left, simultaneously.”
So what will happen when—or if—the joined Right and Left annihilate liberalism? Will it not lead to an even more brutal conflict? Plus, how can the idea that “capitalism is pure evil and must be destroyed from both the right and the left, simultaneously” be united with Dugin’s advocacy of Russia, China, etc., which are not anti-capitalist but simply authoritarian-capitalist? Dugin is anti-capitalist only insofar as capitalism is liberal; he certainly wants capitalism controlled and regulated by a strong nation-state grounded in national tradition—a dream shared by all fascists. And, as Lacan and Miller have reiterated for more than half a century, capitalism is global, which means that the opposition between its liberal version and its authoritarian version is immanent to it.
In the last decade of his work, Lacan became increasingly obsessed with Marx’s critique of political economy. The central category of his work during this period, his notion of surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir), is elaborated through a constant reference to Marx’s notion of surplus value. This reliance on Marx indicates that Lacan was desperately searching for a way out of capitalism, envisioning psychoanalysis as a potential escape, which was already underway in the years following 1968. However, he asked for more: that psychoanalysis be a way out of capitalism for more than just a select few.
Lacan seeks this escape in the direction of sainthood, but he defines sainthood in a very specific way: a saint is one who wholly adopts excremental identity, who is reduced to a piece of refuse—not that we should all become saints in the usual sense of the term. What we should learn is to step outside the capitalist superego pressure to “more and more,” to incessant progress, and outside its economy of expanded self-reproduction, which also survived in classical Marxism and real-existing socialism. Here is the key proposition from Lacan’s Television:
“A saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas. Rather, he acts as trash (déchet); his business being trashitas (il décharite).”
And here is François Regnault’s commentary on this proposition:
“Here begins the paradox, for in the common image, a saint does indeed engage in charity. Lacan suggests that it is precisely this charity that the saint gets rid of; the saint discharges himself of the burden of charity. And in this way, ‘trachity’ (déchariter) is a condensation of trash and charity and, I add, begins like décharge, the loaded term that it is.”
Lacan’s stance against charity gains new relevance today as charitable activities have become a key component of big corporations (just recall the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with its tens of billions in donations). For Lacan, charity remains firmly within the traditional logic of the Supreme Good: it allows corporations to re-inscribe their superego’s incessant striving for surplus profit into a contribution to the welfare of all. But can we effectively suspend the capitalist superego through sainthood, which is ultimately an inner subjective stance?
Lacan’s overall view is pessimistic: our future will, in all probability, be a new form of global capitalism supplemented by new religious nationalisms (which is effectively happening now), and psychoanalysis itself, as a specific practice (in which the analyst functions as an excremental saint), will also likely disappear. Psychoanalysis is not eternal; it is possible only within specific social conditions. I remain a Marxist: the capitalist superego is not just an inner subjective stance; it is embedded in a complex network of social and ideological relations and practices that materialize these relations. The struggle should continue at this level.
Miller drew the opposite conclusion from Dugin regarding the social implications of Lacan’s theory: Lacan’s critique of the 1968 student protests was fundamentally a defense of moderate and modest liberalism, compelling us to avoid extremes and to maintain a fragile balance among the components of the social Borromean knot. We definitely see in Lacan a conservative aspect, a liberal aspect, and a leftist anti-capitalist aspect, but Dugin all too quickly conflates traditional liberalism with cancel culture, which, while radicalizing certain liberal tendencies, is opposed by many liberals. Furthermore, it is Dugin himself who, in his eschatological vision of a struggle to the death between global liberalism and the combined “good” Left and Right, advocates for a radical violent change that cannot help but lead to new terror.
So where do I stand? I define myself as a moderately conservative communist. A communist because it seems obvious to me that only a radical social change will enable us to cope with the mortal threats to our survival (environmental changes, AI controlling our lives, new social changes). Conservative because, following Walter Benjamin, insofar as revolutions in the linear-evolutionary sense mean big victories that leave behind many squashed birds (e.g., British colonization of India pushed India toward modernity but left millions dead), we should not be afraid to say that the Benjaminian revolution would be the ultimate counter-revolution: the return and revenge of all squashed birds against the terrible price of progress. For instance, Spartacus lost (don’t forget that he defended a “primitive” pre-class society against “progressive” Rome), but the memory of his slave rebellion persists as a virtual shadow and provides a holographic depth to later rebellions. Moderate because we should always consider the unintended catastrophic consequences of our actions and learn to combine radical measures with steps back. This triad—my own socio-political Borromean knot—perfectly fits Lacanian theory.
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