The politics of destruction : three contemporary configurations of hallucination

When applied to social science, psychoanalytic concepts make it possible to analyze totalitarian action and its derivative, authoritarian action, by highlighting what such regimes have in common: the destruction of frames of reference for space and time; their replacement of those reference points with a restrictive “surreality”; and the assignation of individuals in the social space in terms of the love or hatred attributed to them by those in power.

Whether in Stalinist Bolshevism, posited here as the matrix of the “totalitarian personality”; in its extreme form of totalitarianism with the Islamic State; or in a more diluted variant in the Polish ruling party ‘Law and Justice’ (PiS), each is characterized by the negation of temporal and spatial distance, and therefore by the negation of causal links, displacement and transformation of experience.

These components are specific to the unconscious which, in dreams as Freud considered, acts upon factual datum, denies it, and reproduces it in another way, one that conforms more closely to the dreamer’s desires.

For this reason, the politics that arise from these regimes have much in common with a hallucination.