#Phantasmic remnants series#

Such a distinction would be not only a reality but a necessity, for when a ections enter the political scene they could only imply the impossibility of guiding the behavior upon rational judgments, universalist judgments based on the search for the best argument. A ects would refer to individual systems of fantasies and beliefs, which would preclude the understanding of social life as a system of rules and norms. We accept that the dimension of a ects concerns the individual's life, while understanding the problems connected with social bonds would require a di erent perspective, capable of describing the structural functioning of society and its values. Normally, we believe that a theory of a ects doesn't contribute for clarifying the nature of the impasses of sociopolitical ties. Key-words: Political Enjoyment, normative orders, 'nightly law', sensus communis, Eichmann-trial, jouissance Through all of this, the aim is to illustrate how very concrete excessive fantasies have an impact on a body politic’s form of enjoyment.

#Phantasmic remnants series#

Next to theoretical elaborations of how and why these phantascistic fantasies are produced, the theory will be further explained through a series of exemplifications demonstrating the way that it has played out across a long history of conflict in the Middle East and a shorter history of contemporary politics in the United States. Their impact on the space of reasons is analysed in this article as one that does not take part in the game of giving and asking for reasons, but operates in the background of communal reason via an emotionally and clandestine ‘code’ of what it means to be ‘We … – We who we are’. More precisely, they help to blur aporias within the ideological structures of a community through the evocation of a sensus communis (Kant) that establishes the community anew, similar to an act of religious conversion. I argue that the symptoms of subjects must be understood in the context of their politico-legal history, including its formation, and I examine how the neglect of this account of history-particularly in the context of Australia-can miss the colonial violences that are inherent in law (as a symptom) but also in psychoanalysis as itself a symptom of a particular historical scene.įantasies and especially excessive or ‘phantascistic’ fantasies, as they are referred to here, have the power to suppress within political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, inner antagonisms in times of crisis. In this article, I examine the symptoms of rights-bearing subjects as they have emerged in a particular politico-legal history.

But it also offers the possibility that it is rights-bearing subjects who are specifically desiring in the manner that psychoanalysis proposes. 8), and this idea links desire to rights in a way that psychoanalytic theory and practice must contend. In Douzinas' (2002) terms ' every desire is a potential right ' (p. But can it universally be applied to all? This article argues that psychoanalysis was born in the wake of the French Revolution as the subject of rights came to understand that it could make choices, but that these choices would not always be the right ones. Psychoanalysis has long been used as a tool to analyze the symptomology of individuals and nation states.