Democracy and the Political Unconscious (review)

In recent years, there has been a notable turn to psychoanalysis in political thought. While the political application of psychoanalytic tools is always complicated, tricky, and varied, there are many good reasons for this development. By deploying the tools of psychoanalysis, one can begin to discuss how desire and fantasy bolster the creation and the continuance of the political sphere, how self-deception and unconscious motives silently define political interests, how repression operates in the political realm, and how the death drive ambivalently shapes political life. This turn to psychoanalysis in political thought has traditionally been dominated by Freudian Marxists, such as Herbert Marcuse, and more recently by a Lacanian-inspired New Left, such as Slavoj Žižek, Chantal Mouffe, and Alain Badiou. Noëlle McAfee’s new book, Democracy and the Political Unconscious, breaks with the leftist version of psychoanalytic political thought in presenting a civic republicanism inspired by the work of Julia Kristeva. In this sense, her work is a unique contribution to the ongoing political turn to psychoanalysis.

McAfee’s central concern in Democracy and the Political Unconscious is the violent repetition of political and social traumas. The unresolved nature of these traumas, McAfee claims,

presents a choice: either work through it or cover it over with denial and fabrications. The traumas of our modern times—from the Middle Passage of slavery that founded contemporary empires to the brutal disenchantment that has exchanged the sacred for the profane and arbitrary—are manifestly still wrenching the public worlds we inhabit

(McAfee 2008, 47).

In pointing toward the effect of trauma on the political sphere, McAfee is concerned with the fact that certain forms of political violence exceed a political community’s ability to articulate, fully experience, and thus master them. These unmastered forms of violence repeatedly appear in the political realm. A certain automatism and compulsion come to define them. Given the broad traumatic origins of our political world—New World slavery and the advent of modernity—and the more specific and recent traumas of the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s and 9/11, McAfee claims that the public world is symptomatic of these violent repetitions and remains in the thrall of its own unmastered past.

With repetitions of political trauma at the forefront of this text, McAfee places her hope in the idea that “public talk may serve a psychoanalytic function for the public sphere” (McAfee 2008, 24). She supports this hope with theoretical resources rooted in the writings of Kristeva, Arendt, Habermas, Dewey, and the practical resources of her experience working with the National Issues Forum. McAfee’s central claim is that political trauma can be worked through in public speech. McAfee argues that with public speech, “we can turn private desire into public meaning. In a sense, we use language and other form of expression to locate ourselves outside of ourselves, to find ourselves in a public sphere of meaning” (McAfee 2008, 14). The move from private desire to public meaning in public speech has two distinct political effects for McAfee. On the one hand, it fosters a healthy sublimation, a move “from speechlessness to signification” that fosters a “channeling of drives rather than simply acting on them” (McAfee 2008, 23). And on the other hand, it deepens the participatory role of the citizen, allowing one to situate oneself in the public sphere and feel the pleasure of full participation and recognition. In a sense, the public sphere, when operating appropriately, gives voice to desire and allows all, especially those who may have been excluded from the public sphere, a chance to express themselves. Thus, McAfee advocates cultivating the public sphere as a positive political program because it would not only obviate traumatic repetition in the political realm through sublimation, but also because it would foster a more genuine form of democratic citizenship and political participation.

Yet, it is not the focus on public speech in political thought that is novel about McAfee’s approach. Rather, it is her faith in...