Tragedy AND Farce

Both at the same time! Does the new face of disavowal mean the end of ideology or just add to the rubble? In a brilliant intervention, Alenka Zupancic dives deep into the symptoms now manifesting as the Age of Anxiety rapidly metastisizes. Her book Disavowal argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. This subconscious defensive mechanism is meant to protect through the repression of knowledge. Its most famous formulation goes like this: I know fully well (the traumatic lack) but nonetheless continue to act all the same. And one important, contemporary aspect of the fetish is that I insist that you know that I know. It is both a coping mechanism for keeping the repressed at bay and the source of perverse enjoyment. It is also the only way we can function in a system as obscene as "democratic" capitalism. Take the new administrations vow to "drill baby drill" which we all understand as "burn baby burn". “You can purge a website of the words climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change goes away,” Mr. Lehner said. But in the pathological sense it does "go away"from our disavowed reality. In other words, I know (rational knowledge) that it doesn't go away, but nonetheless... the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality. In this sense, Trump is the perfect avatar for our age, because he actively establishes the terms of a new Big Other. This newly emergent Big Other doesn't understand what we are whinging about! He promises us that we will have fun and could care less about transgression. The Emperor flaunts his nakedness, all with a wink and a grin. He understands instinctually that people need to "believe" conspiracy theories in order to exist in the maelstrom. "I am being decieved, therefore I am." It protects them from the knowledge of their invisibility, their lack of agency, their total inconsequencialness. The more the doomloop grows, the more anxiety there is, the harder it is to disavow the castration, the more people need the phallic Trump to promise an orgy of fun. He promises that no matter what else it is, it will "Not be boring!"