The Subject and the Act: A Necessary Folie à Deux to Think Politics

Abstract

The universalization of the symptom, it can be argued, is most visible within the realm of politics. The symptom allows for contingency to take over the subject, à deux, and in turn to reveal a disarming vulnerability. At this conjuncture the Real of enjoyment and the signifying structure expose an antagonistic relation, particularly in so far as this points to the subject’s ambivalence in confronting the problem of freedom from the symptom. Although Lacan seldom uses the word, freedom permeates his seminars and is precisely located within the psychoanalytic act: that is, subjects reluctantly desire to be freed from the bondage of their symptom through a confrontational and deliberate handling of it. However, the subject and the act (which is the unseen, omnipotent Other) although entwined are never truly connected as one within unavoidable misrecognition. Whereas the political act can be considered indeterminable, the political subject is equally so. It is here that for the divided subject the proximity of desire determines the act which in turn requires recognition, even transgression of the subject’s symptom. A curious and inevitable illusion manifests, that in order for the subject to remain in politics, a kind of symbolic inner voice or faithfulness to the fantasy, must emerge, a folie à deux. In this the subject’s drive for politics remains both elusive yet intact because of its function in keeping alive the symptom driving desire for emancipation via the political act. Through exposing the political act to a serious recognition of the symptom, the subject must bear the consequences of this identification, for better or worse. Here, a truly mad phenomenon occurs where the subject recognises him/herself only through both the inevitability and the subsequent failure of the political act, thereby validating recognition of the symptom but never attaining complete freedom from it.