Biden Dropping Out as a Short-Circuit in the Republican Libidinal Strategy.
For what happens to whomever does not want to recognize that political economy is libidinal, is that he reproduces in other terms the same phantasy of an externalized region where desire would be sheltered from every treacherous transcription into production, labor and the law of value. The fantasy of a non-alienated region.
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy
In his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, presents a revolutionary idea. He argues that the psychic apparatus does not merely conform to the imperatives of the pleasure principle. Instead, it is shaped by the dialectical struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the pleasure principle, and the death-drive.
This groundbreaking discovery allows us to understand the crucial role of masochism in the unconscious mechanisms of the psyche and its manifestations in the socius.
Having radical implications for psychoanalysis, many post-Freudians have dismissed the notion of the death-drive or have simply reinterpreted it as a desire for aggression. It is only with the French structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that the self-destructive component of psychic enjoyment is brought back to the forefront of our understanding of the subject and radicalized.
This may seem pretty counterintuitive and abstract; however, one must look no further than Trump’s election campaign to get a clear picture of the death-drive in action. In this article, I will try to highlight the death-driven libidinal nature of Trump’s presidential campaign and why Biden dropping out of the presidential race has ignited a state of panic within the Republican Party.
Lacan notes that psychic satisfaction is not simply a byproduct of the attainment of the object of desire. In fact, like Freud, he believes that the object has “no importance” regarding the satisfaction that one gets vis-à-vis their drive (Trieb). No object can satisfy the drive. The drive is a konstante Kraft (constant force) whose excitation, unlike a need, cannot be eliminated via the pleasure principle. Instead, the drive finds satisfaction through the repetition of the failure to attain the object of desire, fantasized by the psychic apparatus. This underlies the inherent displeasure of our desiring condition. If the object is never attained, what permits subjects to find satisfaction in repeated failure is notably the fetishism of the obstacle to their satisfaction. In the case of the psychic apparatus of MAGA supporters, the unattainable fantasized object is the “Great America” evoked by their slogan. To fight their socio-psychic malaise that the restoration of a Great America would eliminate, Trumpists substantialize a series of particular enemies that block access to non-alienating libidinal existence (immigrants, leftists, political elites, etc…). These enemies are discursively constructed to fulfill death-driven aims, i.e, to enjoy the impossibility of a libidinally satisfied subjective condition. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in Against the Populist Temptation:
…populist discourse displaces antagonism and constructs the enemy. In populism, the enemy is externalized or reified into a positive ontological entity (even if this entity is spectral) whose annihilation would restore balance and justice…
The enemies of fantasized enjoyment fulfill contradictory roles in the psychic landscape of the Trumpists as they must be conceived as both easy targets to annihilate and all-powerful particularities that justify the failure of the attainment of the fantasized object of the drive. For example, “illegal aliens” are viewed both as lazy individuals who profit from government handouts as well as hard workers who steal jobs from Americans (“They’re taking Black jobs”). Similarly, Biden is imagined as being “sleepy” and senile while equally being a dangerous political mastermind.
Since the drive “circles around” the object, the obstacle provides satisfaction. In the same way that French theorist Jean-François Lyotard claimed provocatively that his academic Marxist peers “enjoyed” capitalism, we must understand that Trump supporters enjoy Joe Biden. He is the perfect obstacle for the drive, an entity that can be blamed for all psychic malaise while a fantasy of his annihilation is easily conceptualized.
Since the Trump movement is death-driven, it enjoys being repressed by the establishment it wishes to blow up as it confirms its presence within the social sphere and transgressive importance. Similarly, a toddler can enjoy being punished by its parents as it confirms control over the parental figure and reinforces a sense of identity. Being repressed creates a sense of martyrdom in Trumpian prestige. When Trump loses, he wins. This reality is reflected by his recent posts on “Truth Social”:
Every time the Radical Left Democrats, Marxists, Communists, and Fascists indict me, I consider it a GREAT BADGE OF HONOR. I’m being indicted for YOU.
The Biden/Harris Administration did not properly protect me, and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy. IT WAS MY GREAT HONOR TO DO SO!
This dynamic was also brought to the forefront following the record wave of donations to Trump’s campaign following his conviction of fraud (a record that has since been beaten by Kamala Harris’s campaign) and the attention he gained after his assassination attempt.
This political dimension of death-driven enjoyment is so radical that even Freud could not anticipate it. In Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, published a year after he theorizes the death-drive, Freud states while describing the authority of leaders that
All prestige, however, is also dependent upon success and is lost in the event of failure.
He seemingly ignored that the leader’s failure could feed his prestige by turning him into a martyr in the face of the to-be-eliminated particularity. In a sense, Lacan “corrects” Freud’s sometimes simplistic dualisms by noting that they are embedded in grammatical structures rather than libidinal structures, following the dictates of linguistic subject-object relations and their inversions rather than embracing the contradictory nature of enjoyment.
By portraying himself as the victim of an establishment scheme against him, Trump awakens enjoyment among his followers. He is equally able to be portrayed as someone “outside” of the political establishment, granting full immunity to his discursive transgressions, focusing on enjoyment creation rather than on political promises. The recent Republican National Convention, in all its pseudo-transgressive obscenity, has been metonymic for the Trumpian libidinal strategy: alienate Americans from their superstructural entities via semiotic rule-breaking and interpellate the necrophilic condition of political desire. As Biden is a boring establishment figure who is unable to out-enjoy Trump, the RNC was a libidinal explosion in which the Republican Party slammed on the accelerators of the death-drive, and a wave of fantasized enjoyment was semiotically drawn. The selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running-mate is proof.
Despite the RNC being envisioned as a unifying moment in the wake of Trump’s assassination attempt, it became evident to all speakers that unity does not provoke jouissance. Consequently, they reverted to the familiar discourse of particularism. Trumpian unity is fundamentally one of radical exclusion. As Barret Weber notes in Laclau and Žižek On Democracy and Populist Reason,
The movement [populism] basically knows who and what it is because it knows what it is not – that is, the enemy.
Trumpian unity is inherently dependent on the construction of a substantialized enemy, as the “people” signifier within the MAGA movement operates as an empty signifier. The uniting enjoyment of Trump supporters is derived from their perception of being repressed by an external parasitic force, through which their collective identity is articulated and sustained as a non-identity. Lacan famously criticized the signifier “woman”, pronouncing “Il n’y a pas La femme” (There is not The woman) to demonstrate that the “oneness” associated with the signifier was situated in the realm of the “Imaginary”. Woman as a singular totalizing category does not exist, woman is multiple, but fetishized into existence as singular by man’s desire, the signified object of desire of male subjectivity. Using this theoretical exploration, we must note that “The People do not exist” The “people” signifier that orientates Trumpian enjoyment is the discursive incarnation of the castrated subject of MAGA’s non-castrated “Ideal-ego” of substantial “oneness” which rejects the outsiders of the social sphere.
Therefore, collective enjoyment of the MAGA identity is dependent upon the semiotic construction of the fetishized enemy. The state of panic that the Republican Party seems to be in since Biden’s dropping out of the presidential race is symptomatic of the loss of a clear discursively constructed fetishized enemy. The horrific discursive aura placed upon Biden advantaged Trump who seemed to be rather in denial following the news of his opponent’s decision to drop out as it could sustain his disintegrating desiring-circuit while he props up a new one:
It’s not over! Tomorrow Crooked Joe Biden’s going to wake up and forget that he dropped out of the race today!
To cope with the crumbling down of their libidinal strategy, Trump supporters have developed two responses:
- Reframe the obstacle to the object of their drive as the fact that Biden will be in the White House for the next 6 months.
- Transfer the fetish of the enemy towards the de facto Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
However, both strategies reveal that the MAGA movement is a libidinal deadlock. In the past few days, Republicans have embarrassingly tried to hold on to their masochistic satisfaction at the roots of their identity, yet it increasingly simply looks like schoolyard bullying as they attack Harris with the same viciousness as they did with Biden only with less fetishistic relevance. Eager to satisfy the dictates of death-drive, Republicans try to recreate the structural circuit that fueled their libidinal strategy by “swapping out” the obstacle signifier with a new one, creating a state of panic among their party. Lacan notes that the dissolution of one’s symbolic order can be traumatizing as it confronts us to the Real of our unconscious desires.
Another reason why the Trump campaign is facing rising libidinal threats is the desiring-circuit that the new Harris campaign is proposing. Lacan illustrates that desire is always necrophilic, it aims at a lost object (objet a) which is a fantasy of a harmonious non-lacking psychic and desiring past. Subjects are castrated as they feel as if they lack a sense of Neoplatonic “oneness”, always searching for a phallic master-signifier that would “fill” their lack. The Trumpian slogan “Make America Great Again” interpellates that subjective condition by constructing the fantasy of a once-pure American society in which the “people” were non-lacking as the substantialized enemies were nowhere to be found. The Trumpian desiring-circuit, like Christianity, situates itself libidinally with a harmonious and glorious non-lacking original condition (the Garden of Eden) which has been lost because of the corruption of outsiders (the snake) and promises the resurrection of this original glorious condition (the kingdom of Heaven) through devotion to paternalistic dogma. As Trump is seen by his followers as being a non-castrated leader, he can sell the fantasy of the phallic master-signifier of oneness via his project to return to fantasized greatness. However, as Lacan indicates, no subject possesses the phallus, as lack is the apriori of subjectivity. When sold a non-lacking ideal, Freud teaches us that individuals are ready to form collectivities in which the pleasure principle is subsumed. In contrast, the Harris campaign started by chanting “We are not going back!” after having underlined the failures of the policies of the “Great” America Trumpists wish to resurrect. This move permits her campaign to attack directly the desiring-circuit of Trump’s libidinal strategy by deconstructing the fetishized object for which self-sacrifice is an imperative.
When Lacan claims famously that “The Big Other does not exist”, he suggests that psychic life depends upon the substantialization of signifiers, a trust in semiotic efficiency. This fetishizing trust in signifiers is at the core of subjectivity, underlying our neurotic phenomenological experience. Only psychotics defy the authority of the master-signifier. The hyper-neurotic desiring-circuit of Trumpian libidinalism substantializes a series of signifiers that permit its followers to be both the ultimate victims of the status quo while equally being the future grand victors of history via their investment in Trump’s phallic enjoyment. That is not to say that the Democratic nominee’s libidinal strategy is not fetishistic; it is, however, it is rather conservative, substantializing the symbolic structure of the American political establishment and the slow progress of history. The Trump vs. Harris presidential race is thus one of two opposing desiring-circuits that rest upon different symbolic webs. However, the Trumpian fetishes are fragile and require constant semiotic investment via lies and fear-mongering. It is thus not by indicting Trump that the Republican libidinal strategy can be broken (on the contrary, Trump’s martyrdom only fuels his supporter’s death-driven enjoyment), but by deconstructing the fetishes which hold together its desiring-circuit as shown by the party’s state of panic following Biden’s departure from the presidential race.
In conclusion, to have a proper theoretical arsenal capable of dismantling political fetishes, one must embrace dialectical universalism as it deconstructs vulgar oppositional binaries such as liberal democracy vs. Trumpian populism and underlines how both sides of the binary serve the same universalized structure. Liberals too often discredit Trumpian populism as a simple “mistake” in political discourse, yet it is more and more apparent that this death-driven movement is a clear symptom of the non-addressed failures of liberal democracy. Dialectical thought, however, rejects oppositional discourse in service of universal discourses.