Radical Citizenship - Psychoanalysis and Radical Citizenship

Psychoanalysis and Radical Citizenship

Chbib states: “As citizens we can understand that the signifier dictates the signified, the lacking social reality. We are socially condemned to attain an ideal identity with others and ourselves through discourse, round tables, forums, elections, and town hall meetings. Language is however broken, it is not linear but fragmented full of lacking white noise. Words can never liberate the wholeness of the real; there cannot be a signification of being in language.”

In his idea, radical citizenship must strive for a radical identity, in the symbolic realm to construct a real. It is not sufficient to recognize the constructed reality by means of social meaning; a radical citizenship acknowledges the interdependence of social meaning and social discourse in the formation of objective reality.

Therefore, he argues, by understanding the impossibility of mastering the real and by alleviating the craving to identify this impossibility through the disappointment of efforts to symbolize, it may be that an ethically paradox is maintained. That paradox is the main problem facing construction of meaning as in ideology or in institutions. The impossibility of the real is only understood at the moment of catastrophe, rupture and dislocation, etc…when the suffering understands fantasmically the encounter with the real of nature it becomes a tolerable symbolization of the real capable of recovering the mysterious quality of experience and knowledge.

In a radical citizenship, the subject is to forgo pleasure, which is impossible since humanity is driven by it. To find an appropriate determinant for a more accessible radicalized citizenship the subject must acknowledge the lack in the mechanics for recognizing the ‘real’. By acknowledging and succumbing to an unconscious defence mechanism in which ethically unacceptable instinctual drives persist on ‘realizing’ our being; the subject can assume its radical subjectivity. The radicalization of the engine behind our being, that is the essence of radical citizenship, may help to modify the realm of fantasy that the individual’s personal and social behaviour rests on. The radical citizen must identify with the symptom of the ‘Other’ in order to accept the symptom as his own and not as a lack in the fantasy of the ‘Other.’ Thus democracy is a fantasy congealed in the symbolic realm. The true nature of our human condition prevents an opening of this self- induced aporia. We are a disharmonious and irrational bunch, and we must come to terms with it not in a negative manner, I mean not as deceiving the ‘good’ that we strive for, but by altering the notion of the ‘good’ and accepting the lack of harmony that we create. Recognizing the lack and its spin on our subjectivity allows for a more honest engagement with the social in appropriating the ‘real’. It is for this reason that Lacan and his form of psychoanalysis brings out ideas that are very relevant to an eventual mapping out and deconstruction of a possible/impossible radicalization of citizenship. That is if the word citizenship survives the analysis. The possibilities of a radicalization of the citizen/state binary would create an opening towards a non nation-state based affiliation of the singular in friendship with the community. The concept of a coming of radical citizenship allows the ‘other’ within the individual to be accessible to unhindered political expression.