In what was rumored as a state of inconsolable grief, Javier Milei ordered four lab-grown clones of Conan, the Argentinian president’s dead English Mastiff. Bearing the names Robert, Lucas, Murray, and Milton, Milei’s ctrl-c canines inherited the namesakes of the president’s personal pantheon of libertarian luminaries—Robert Lucas Jr., Murray Rothbard, and, looming largest, Milton Friedman.
In Argentina’s 2023 presidential election, Milei secured a resounding victory. Far from tarnishing his public image, Milei’s eccentric and irreverent behavior appeared to galvanize his supporters—antics and idiosyncrasies now elevated as cornerstones of his personal firebrand of free-market brinkmanship. A self-styled “anarcho-capitalist” and unapologetic libertarian, Milei cosplays (literally) as a hero of his own design, General AnCap. As with Trump, Milei’s inauguration dispelled any presumptive unviability that pundits posited about such an off-color candidate, and the unpopularity of the radical anarcho-capitalist ideology he touted as panacea for Argentina’s moribund economy. Notwithstanding Milei’s unorthodox campaign and extreme economic policies, Argentines were desperate for change. This electoral triumph represents a new reckoning with how the historical crises of Argentina have sown a seedbed for runaway free market ideology to flourish.
Specifically, Milei’s is a perverted freedom. When I say that Milei is a pervert—and libertarianism a discourse of perversion—I am neither pathologizing nor subscribing to a normative judgment about perceived abnormal behavior. Per Lacan, perversion represents a structural relation between the subject and their society—namely, a paradoxical relation between knowledge and belief, and how the subject enacts the law of a big Other not despite but because of the subject’s ‘liberty.’. More importantly, this structure offers insights into capitalist subjectivization and the social process of subject making as hypostatized and overdetermined by discourses and logics that reify notions of the inalienable, of liberty, and that foment mistrust of the state, law, and public life. In an incisive article published in these very pages, Florian Maiwald elucidated the paradox of the libertarian imagination whereby a pursuit of untrammeled freedom paves the serfdom road towards draconian infringements upon freedom itself. The defiant rattlesnake emblazoned on the Gadsden flag eventually coils into an ouroboros consuming itself. Symptomatic of the crisis of freedom under capitalism, libertarianism figures as both a reaction to and reinforcement of what Marx illustrated as capital’s perverse freedoms: “The period of time for which [the worker] is free to sell his labor-power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it.” Marx demonstrated a conception of economic liberty, otherwise mystified by bourgeois economists, that never constituted a social contract freely entered into, but rather a mode of production that required state violence and the systematic enclosure of common land.
Maiwald effectively parses out libertarianism’s perversion of freedom. Not only have libertarian projects failed to construct an economic utopia of hyperindividualism and limited government, but in attempting to do so they frequently conjure their ostensible opposites: authoritarianism and military dictatorships. In a strict sense, then, libertarianism exhibits the psychoanalytic structure of perversion that sustains subjects in fetishistic, if not sado-masochistic, relations with the endemic contradictions of capital. Libertarianism does not deny these immanent antagonisms, but disavows them.
As Maiwald rightly contends, the current economic and political crisis of Milei’s Argentina exemplifies the tendency toward “libertarian authoritarianism.” Milei’s austerity regime has earned it the epithet of “chainsaw economics”—an appropriately sadistic and phallic image, and, wielding one during rallies, a fetishistic one to boot. Like Trump, Milei painted his crusade against the vestiges of the old, Peronist developmentalist order as a fight against a corrupted state bureaucracy and what libertarians like to call “crony” capitalism. However, Milei’s economic overhaul has consisted less of rooting out corruption than dismantling the few remaining social securities of the state. In recent weeks, this Argentinian chainsaw massacre rolled out a spate of austerity measures with messianic conviction. Worker’s have lost pensions, and utilities costs have skyrocketed as a result of the elimination of state subsidies in fuel and electricity.
Argentina is no stranger to political and economic upheavals. Since the 1970s, CIA-backed coups and military juntas unleashed repressive state violence. Chicago School neoliberal policies, proselytized by Milton Friedman, put the country under the thumb of the IMF as its nationalized industries were auctioned off to foreign companies. While Milei’s own economic shock therapy has ushered in a new era of austerity, the president has enjoyed at least a modicum of success—the inflation rate remains at a record low. However, such short-term successes have merely shifted the brunt of the burden onto the Argentinian working class whose social securities, buying power, and jobs have disappeared.
In the last few weeks, the state of the country reached critical condition after Argentina’s congress narrowly passed Milei’s flagship reform bill, otherwise known as the “omnibus law.” Originally a voluminous legal document containing 660 articles, Milei’s administration applied the hedge trimmers in revising the reform package down to a still staggering 200-plus articles. Though pruned, the reform bill remains a testament to Milei’s signature chainsaw razing. The subsequent protests, in which police deployed water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets, erupted in response to reforms that sought to privatize state industries, spur further foreign investment by privileging foreign companies, and granting carte blanche legislative powers to the president. Milei’s actions, indicative of how free-market pillaging becomes prelude to authoritarian takeover, demonstrate the paradox at the heart of libertarian experiments: the perversion of liberty leads not to freedom, neither political nor economic, but to the entrenchment of a sovereign and autocratic law.
Like the attenuation of the symbolic under capitalism, the Lacanian analyst Bruce Fink identifies perversion “as owing to the absence or failure of symbolization” [1]. In a strictly clinical sense, Fink views the subject’s instatement into the symbolic as contingent upon two processes—alienation and separation. Whereas the neurotic successfully undergoes both (alienation from the mOther’s jouissance through putting into language the paternal prohibition “No!” and then separation from that jouissance via the father’s naming the mOther’s desire and thus carving out a symbolic space for the child), within the structure of perversion, alienation has succeeded to the failure of separation.
Fink attributes this failure to a lax paternal authority who is decidedly not the domineering, stern father of old, but “the all-too-common contemporary father who never worked out his own problems with authority” [2]. Though Fink’s emasculated paternal archetype surfaces within clinic practice, he perhaps inadvertently supplies an apt metaphor for the socio-political crisis of modernity. Capitalism’s supplanting pre-capitalist, traditional society coincided with a reconfiguration of the law from the public to the private sphere of reproductive relations—what Foucault would call the transition from sovereign power to disciplinary techniques. Ending what Bakhtin termed the carnivalesque, capitalism heralded the domestication of carnival. At least putatively, hegemonic discourses of freedom and liberty reorganized the social relations of the public; sovereignty and tyranny, conversely, were exported to the private realm of the patriarchal family. For Sylvia Federici, constructed from the “privatization of social relations,” the bourgeois family unit codified power “to working-class men over women by means of women’s exclusion from the wage.” To historicize Fink’s characterization of the pervert’s father, a Marxist analysis might insist that the father’s unresolved “problems with authority” stem not just from his own daddy issues, but from his social class position as a worker-father in absentia through which children develop closer attachments to the unpaid reproductive labor of their mothers—or, in less essentialized terms, to an intimate relation with the differentials, disparities, and contradictions of capitalist ‘freedoms.’
Without the function of the law to separate the subject from a traumatic jouissance, and thus failing to secure for the subject their own symbolic domain, Fink describes the perverse subject’s unconscious drive as an “attempt to prop up the law so that limits can be set to jouissance” [3]. In essence, absent a symbolic law that separates the subject from the mOther, the perverse subject comes to know exactly what the Other desires: the subject as object that fills the Other’s lack. Like Little Hans who knows his mother lacks a phallus yet believes she possesses one anyways, the knowledge of this lack gets disavowed and displaced onto a fetish object that the subject believes fills that lack—a conscious belief that the object functions in service to the Other’s jouissance when, unconsciously, the object actually serves the purpose of shoring up the limiting law for the perverse subject who, lacking symbolic separation, cannot endure the limitless, traumatic enjoyment of the mOther. Alternatively, for the libertarian, the fetishistic, masochistic, and sadistic tendencies index unconscious registers of the traumatic encounter with an inalienable liberty inseparable from the subject. In lieu of a symbolic space, the libertarian subject in fact desires to enact a law that will alleviate the traumatic encounter with freedom.
Caught between knowing and believing, the structure of perversion evinces an epistemological crisis, namely one in which the subject registers the traumatic crisis of its own freedom. Subtending the maximization of surplus-value, Marx demonstrated the perversion of freedom under capitalism which, for the subject, instantiates a crisis of knowing how and why it is, or is not, free. Freud theorized that perversion proceeds by the mechanism Verleugnung; translated as disavowal. Alenka Zupančič carefully distinguishes that “disavowal is not the same as denial, it brings about a split between knowledge and belief.” This “knowledge about some traumatic reality” is transformed into “the object-fetish that protects us against this reality.” The epistemic position of the pervert allows for contradictions to coexist not dialectically but on the condition that one is disavowed in order to sustain belief in the other. Appropriately perverting our commonsensical understanding that knowledge emerges from the disenchantment of belief, the mechanism of disavowal activates a reversal insofar that some piece of knowledge precedes and prefigures the emergence of belief. Famously, theorists like Mannoni and Žižek have encapsulated this position in the phrase “I know well, but all the same.” As Mannoni explains, “the sole reason for the ‘but all the same’ is the ‘I know well.’ […] the sole reason for the existence of the fetish is that the fetishist knows that women have no phallus.” Similarly, Marx’s discussion of the commodity fetish reveals that the knowledge of the labor theory of value discovered, and disavowed, by classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, engendered not a thoroughgoing diagnosis of the internal contradictions of capital, but a more resolutely entrenched belief in the invisible hand of the market, knowledge of exactly what the big Other desires. Knowledge begets belief.
Although the libertarian ethos adopts a kind of Nietzschean will-to-power wielded by a free-market vanguard whose ranks appear filled by the likes of Ayn Rand and Elon Musk, Lacan tells us that unconsciously perversion aims towards a “will-to-jouissance” (a not insignificant linguistic echo in the French jouissance—i.e., enjoyment—and the French puissance—i.e., power). The perverse subject, and the sado-masochistic derivations thereof, wills the Other to enjoy excessively by becoming the Other’s object in order to, ultimately, make the Other enact the law. In Fink’s analysis of masochistic perversion, and the repetition required in order for the subject to enact the law, the absence of the symbolic means the pervert can only take solace in the enunciatory yet fleeting act of the law itself, not its symbolic permanence—that is, in the tonality of the harsh scolding or stern reprimand—in content, not form. In his brilliant sociological work on the co-emergence of emancipatory and self-defeating tendencies within working-class countercultures, Paul Willis succinctly captures this flagellation: “Capitalist freedoms are potentially real freedoms and capitalism takes the wager, which is the essence of reproduction, that the freedoms will be used for self-damnation” [4] In this way, and far be it from evading or circumventing the law, libertarianism, like perversion, figures as an attempt to enact and enunciate the law. Inevitably, the symbolic law can only materialize for the pervert as what Fink calls libidinal invocations, the “vindictiveness and cruelty” that “constitute the hidden face of the law” [5]. This law, therefore, becomes the obscene, ruthless law of the authoritarian.
Libertarians, who tendentiously move the proverbial goal post each time these laissez faire society building experiments go awry, may disavow Milei’s recent consolidation of executive power. However, libertarian ideology registers as an unconscious desire to enact the vindictiveness of the law and, according to Fink, to “get off on the enactment of castration.” In accord with Maiwald, the libertarian slide into authoritarianism appears as not the exception but the rule. Of course, the rule, for the perverse subject, signifies the rule of law—or an omnibus of them in Argentina’s case—that must be willed into existence. Milei’s own proclamation that “the market is ourselves” objectivizes the subject in relation to ‘freed’ and liberalized markets that create the conditions of possibility for authoritarian reigns of terror. For the pervert to believe that they “act directly as the instrument of the big Other’s will,” or, especially in this context, the “big Other of the market,” leads not to liberation, but to the erection of a repressive law that conceals the inherent contradictions in capitalist freedoms.
In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx intimated the perverse structure in liberal conceptions of freedom when he wrote “the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself.” Defending liberty, the perverse subject, as Fink argues, attempts to stage separation, albeit one that unconsciously requires an enunciation of the law. Willing this authority figure to jouissance, the masochistic mode of perversion makes this big Other, according to Hyldgaard, “think that she is not a puppet on a string, but a true sovereign.”
The Nazi jurist and legal theorist Carl Schmitt infamously wrote in his 1922 Political Theology that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” [6]. Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, theorized that only those who, in times of emergency, enunciate a space outside of the legal framework of constitutional law can effectively wield sovereignty. Although Schmitt provides us with the obscene obverse side of the liberal coin, his political theory intuits the distinctive paradox of perversion—in their direct access to the jouissance of the Other, the pervert does not freely skirt the law but must erect it. The sovereign, for the pervert, is not only a projection of their own belief in an exception to the law, but is he who incarnates the apotheosis of the law itself: an authority who invokes the law in order to suspend the law. The exception that proves the rule.
Intensifying and acute crises and emergencies proliferate around us. We would do well to learn lessons from the pervert’s relation to his sovereign. We would do well to understand these dynamics as they have played out in Argentina’s present and past. Melanie Klein, in her magisterial The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, traces the free-market fundamentalism and neoclassical economic experiments that ravaged the Southern Cone of Latin America throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Chile and Argentina figuring as particularly shell-shocked casualties of the economic reforms which unleashed repressive and violent dictatorships. In appropriately perverse language, Klein describes these atrocities—such as general Videla’s military dictatorship in 1976 which murdered and disappeared nearly thirty thousand dissident Argentines—as “sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes” designed to “prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free market ‘reforms’” [7]. On the ground and amongst the people, sustained exposure to state terror, extrajudicial killings, and traumatic economic shock therapy—the perverse logic whereby ‘freed’ economic markets coexist alongside abusive authoritarian regimes—a structure of perversion, and mechanism of disavowal, manifested among the incapacitated masses. Concerning the conflictual emotions of Argentines who bore witness to the political genocide and, yet, out of fear of becoming targets, disavowed there existence, Klein describes the phenomenon as “the paradox of wide-eyed knowing and eyes-closed terror” [8]. Still, the Argentine people at least inscribed this perverse paradox through language, a shared signifier in the phrase: “We did not know what nobody could deny.”
Milei’s consolidation of power seems to evoke a historical amnesia, a relapse into a not knowing what we cannot deny: capitalism will not free us. Alas, Milei continues to boast a 49% approval rating. For us in the U.S., we would also do well to not look away from this as our Supreme Court has begun to enact its own state of exceptions in declaring immunity for sovereign Trump tout court (lucidly written about here by Crispin Sartwell), and when the figureheads of Project 2025 envision their own consolidation of power instigating nothing short of what they hope will become a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” Although a political party that simultaneously flaunts free market capitalism and the rule of law and order provides numerous opportunities to scrutinize hypocrisies, we should understand these inconsistencies as symptomatic of the crisis of freedom under capitalism. It is, after all, the perverse subject who must necessarily subscribe to the rule of law and order to sustain their belief in their own liberty. If the left mobilizes any interventions today, it must sustain if not a belief in liberty, then faith in liberation.
Notes and Bibliography
[1] See Bruce, Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, 179.
[2] Ibid, 180.
[3] Ibid, 165.
[4] See Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, 175.
[5] Fink, 190.
[6] See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 5.
[7] See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 11.
[8] Ibid, 111.