Politics and the Fear of Breakdown

Contemporary Political Theory

Breakdown is an apt word for encapsulating the present political moment. Liberal institutions are increasingly dysfunctional, and civic norms are steadily eroding in democracies old and new; social trust is disintegrating, and climate catastrophe manifests through extreme temperatures and increasingly violent floods, fires, and hurricanes. In this age of derangement, public traumas and fears-surrounding, for instance, racial or gender violence and inequities, or cultural, economic, technological, and climactic transformations-interface with psychological dramas and defenses. Psychic troubles-anxiety, depression, or paranoia-are increasingly public matters, if not directly political phenomena. For these reasons and more, Noëlle McAfee argues that political theory and praxis need psychoanalysis; not simply as a means of identifying the political pathologies attendant to breakdown but also for imagining alternatives in our troubled world. McAfee begins with the concept of breakdown itself, as articulated by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. For Winnicott, breakdown is an experience of primordial emptiness or an 'unthinkable state of affairs' that underlies the ego's defense organizations (p. xiii). Breakdown occurs because the ego is not mature enough to 'encompass' the phenomenon of maternal rupture or able to gather 'all the phenomena' of natal separation 'into the area of personal omnipotence' (p. xiii). Breakdown, and the original repression it inaugurates, persists within the unconscious, but it is the fear of this experience-which took place prior to the establishment of an ego capable of experiencing-that can 'destroy' the individual's life (p. xiii). Therefore, Winnicott argues that patients need to be reminded that the breakdown has already happened in order to work through the unspeakable fear that the breakdown is still yet to occur. Confronting the fear of breakdown enables the construction of an ego that can bring the event into its 'present time experience,' structured by the facilitating environment provided by analysis (xiv).

2018

See also the uploaded videos on "Capitalism and its Discontents" (Conference, April 2018). 'The world is out of order' is the astonished complaint made even by leading politicians after consulting the results of the recent elections in the US and in many parts of Europe. The point of view is shared by many and has found its way into the public media almost everywhere. What is less frequently mentioned, if mentioned at all, is that many of our political economies are currently in a deep process of general decline. We are currently facing an encompassing crisis spanning all major dimensions of governance. This crisis has had widespread and, so far, unimaginable effects on various sectors of the population often expressing itself in what is euphemistically termed 'populism' by the mainstream press. Yet, the notion of populism tends to be vague, ambiguous, and analytically underdetermined. The following thoughts, therefore, shall look for a more precise definition by considering questions that are crucial as potential points of entry for further research. Firstly, how would one need to imagine and to analyse the crisis of governance? Secondly, what are its primary social and political effects? Finally, how do people react to these reverberations in their lives when deciding to turn to different forms of (organized) collective action? The suggestions raised in what follows, then, are intended to call for an interdisciplinary and international approach that is both theoretically ambitious and empirically comparative in nature.

Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies/Revista Bilingue de Letras e Estudos Luso-Americanos, 2021

istory has demonstrated that political populism is a challenger that can easily erode the institutional checks on executive power necessary for the durability of the democratic regime. Democracy is fragile, and we should be particularly attentive to the lessons of the past as various political populist leaders have popped up in the political arenas across the globe. Recent academic research on political populism has contended that populist political strategies prove particularly effective when they rely on the control of the emotional response of voters, especially at times of socioeconomic constraints. Illustrative studies include Salmela and von Scheve's (2017), which argues that repressed shame is the critical emotion that gradually builds the widespread support for political populism, and Landowski's (2020), which establishes that esthesia, i.e., the exacerbated incitement of feelings to generate the audience's emotional responses, is the basis of the political populist rhetoric. In view of this, to what extent we can also learn about this matter from is the question we can all ask ourselves. Various writers have instigated widespread discussion about totalitarianism by imagining the social implications of the far-reaching consequences of governments that have built up on populations' emotional responses in order to implement their political strategies. George Orwell's, Aldous Huxley's, and H.G. Wells's dystopian narratives show us that everything could indeed have gone wrong in the twentieth century and that glimpses of heaven actually anticipated nightmarish experiences. In addition, streaming service Hulu's television series The Handmaid's Tale (2017), based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name, has proven that a dystopian narrative that imagines societies riddled with misogyny and other forms of oppression is a valuable starter to discuss present-day politics and societal issues. Montanha Distante, António Ladeira's latest novel, is a critical dystopia that fosters our thoughts about present-day politics, particularly when populist political rhetoric is combined with individual charisma. A Portuguese diaspora writer and a professor of Portuguese language and literatures at Texas Tech University, António Ladeira is the author of a diverse literary production that ranges between poetry and narrative. The two short story volumes Os Monociclistas e outras histórias do ano 2045 and Seis drones: novas histórias do ano 2045 were published in Portugal in 2018 by On y va, the same publisher that also launched Montanha Distante at the end of 2020. Despite these narratives sharing a similar tone that mingles subtle irony with a dystopian perspective of life, Montanha Distante offers a significant difference: unlike Ladeira's short stories, this narrative is not set in a particular future. Dates are never specified, and this fact alone should be enough to startle us because the possibility of situating consequences of extreme situations in a chronological future is derailed. As a matter of fact, this narrative lacks any idea of future, although we can easily foresee that the future can be gloomy as the plot resembles the entanglements of present-day populist politics.

Brazilian Political Science Review, 2013

Hong Kong Economic Journal, 19 February 2014

Security Dialogues, 2021

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, along with the longings for a return to "normal state", statements that nothing will be the same afterwards could also be heard. However, the real task remains in deconstructing the relationship between the pre-pandemic normality and the political consequences that coronavirus has shed light on. Hence, the idea of a global risk society, developed by sociologist Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, could easily be recalled within those circumstances. Questioning the role of politics and political science while assuming that we live in a post-industrial age, the central idea presupposes that politics is displaced from the traditional areas of big, ideological questions. In other words, in the age of Anthropocene marked as reflexive modernization, it is being considered that politics is merely taking place as subpolitics, dealing with individual things considering small, everyday life politics. Deprived of big questions, it rather anticipates manmade risks as the consequences of modernization and achievements of the changed nature related to production and distribution in capitalist societies. Though, this paper aims to see how the global state of emergency-as a state of exception-shook such ideas, illuminating their hidden ideological charge with the goal to normalize the relations of power and domination within society. In this regard, the paper also seeks to contribute to the discussion of the importance of social and political crises and transformations, and to affirm a critical concept of theoretical practice.

contercurrents, 2016

Across the world, many democracies are in crisis and the civilization is crumbling. The crisis erupts because there is an impoverishment of political life where intolerance, greed, ignorance and rage are growing recklessly. The vibrancy of the democracies is diminishing as the public sphere of informed democratic dialogue is shrinking. Blatant lies, infantile emotionalism, absolute disrespect, open display of religious and other forms of discrimination, racism, misogyny, casteism and bigotry and other such evils are replacing the concept of the egalitarianism and consensus building. The substantive engagement with the ideas in the public life is being emptied of contents and as happening in the mainstream media, celebrity culture is being promoted in political and social life, which relies more on emotions rather than reasons or the rationalism. The spectacle of right wing fantasies is growing as the public sphere is increasingly occupied by the majoritarian Hindu, upper caste elite male 1 club in India as compared to White male Christian club in the US or other parts of the West. The concept of respecting the diverse views is being collapsed in the cacophony of uninformed arguments, unintelligible jargon, esoteric theories and unsubstantiated opinions. Lawlessness is increasing and fanatics are getting louder and louder. Ignorance clubbed with the power, narcissism and megalomaniac attitude among ruling elite is giving rise to the dangerous state of affairs. The democratic secular ethos are being replaced by the culture of blood thirsty crony capitalism, cruelty and politics of uncivility. Anti-intellectualism and oligarchy is expanding while pushing for catastrophic human miseries because the totalitarian tyrannical and authoritarian state had failed. Militarization is expanding causing harm to the unarmed citizens while war mongers are consolidating their power. The language, the culture, the ethos, the civility, all are being infantilized and crippled leading to the decay of socio-political environment. The world is being pushed into the dark times by the newly emerged populous self-centered leaders. Democracies across the world are facing

In concert with its creation of Capitalism’s Invisible Army, LAWCAP’s decision at the close of the 1940s to start World War III in order to keep capitalism in business resulted in our illegitimate corporate state both being wedded to denial of increasing global overheat, one of the vilest deceptions in history, and our unaccountable U.S. Intelligence Police operating beyond the strictures of law, as formal federal policy, by daily committing several hundred crimes including terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights. A primary root of this mind-bending criminal government lawlessness is a direct result and outgrowth of the assassination of President Kennedy by key elements within our Intelligence Police. Our law-breaking, illegitimate government continues to exponentially expand its death operations via policies carried out by CIA and Pentagon-based funding. For our species to survive this evolutionary moment, it is imperative to accelerate the shift from this collapsing dominator system to one based on partnership. As co-creators of our own evolution, we can choose the alternative of breakthrough rather than breakdown. Willful U.S. criminal inaction on the ecological crisis threatening Life Security throughout Mother Earth requires non-violent rebellion to change course away from the dead-end future of a mass extinction event while determining what options still exist to be acted upon in the face of this unfolding crisis era of ecological emergency we are by day sinking evermore deeply into. The requirement for this regenerative process of collective involvement in a truly democratic dynamic to determine best strategies to deal with and respond to the climate and ecological emergency becoming evermore dire can be a driver and catalyst for accelerating the shift from domination to partnership.