Debate is structured by an agential fantasy—the plan is an [] that is answered and alleviated by the judge only to restart the cycle. That’s why the aff and WTO protesters share a common refusal to turn past politics in favor of a demand that seeks for recognition within the hegemonic order.

In the run up to the 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun, the Mexican Government composed a list of the sixty most “globalophobic” leaders of antiglobalization groups. The document, subsequently leaked to the Mexican newspaper La Reforma, was met with predictable criticisms regarding the relationship between state security apparatuses, the institutions of global economic governance, and democratic protest. But there were less predictable responses: in addition to criticisms that the list chilled democratic dissent, some antiglobalization groups criticized the list for not being comprehensive enough, demanding its expansion. Activist Josef Schneider wrote: “What do we have to do to get a little credit? . . . In a not-very secret document . . . the Mexican government compiled a list of ‘globalophobic leaders’ who will be singled out for special scrutiny by the Mexican police. Despite the role that Portland activists played in the collapse of the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle, none of us made the list!”24 More than a passing lament, the remainder of the article analyzes the reasons why the Mexican government neglected to include any Portlanders, arguing that the Mexican state’s class bias prompted them to ignore the true threat that ordinary citizens posed to the WTO: “They can’t accept that a bunch of ordinary citizens are the ones who are the biggest threat to shut down the WTO. . . . How typical.”25 By this diagnosis, the Mexican response typifies institutional attempts to downplay protest. Here, the lack of recognition does not make the protest ineffective, instead the fact that the Mexican government and the WTO underestimate the danger posed by ordinary citizens animates this critique. Not to be outdone, the Mexico Solidarity Network created an online form letter for self-identified “dangerous antiglobalization groups”: Dear Government Agents Bent on Restricting Civil Liberties, I recently found out about the “watch list” prepared by Mexican authorities, purportedly to quell the voice of civil society at the upcoming WTO Ministerial in Cancun. . . . Please add my name to your “watch list” immediately!! Nothing less is acceptable.26 One might read such demands as parodic critiques of globalization and security, as ironic calls for mobilization, as a strategy of overidentification, or as any combination of these. Even though these demands represent a call for inclusion as a means of democratizing global governance, these demands are not simply for inclusion: they are also demands to be recognized as dangerous and in solidarity with other similarly dangerous global citizens. How is it possible to ground a reading of the rhetorical functions of the demand to be recognized as dangerous? For Laclau, such demands ought be read through their potential to activate relations of solidarity: the individual call to be recognized as dangerous and excluded opens the possibility for equivalential linkages between the subjects who lodge such demands and others who are similarly situated in relation to the hegemonic order. Here, all demands entail a split between the concrete particular conditions of their articulation and the more universal political possibility that they potentially ground. This split implies that demands are caught up in a formal logic of trope: metonymic connections between disparate demands are condensed in metaphors that figure a relation to and make claims on a political order. But in a Lacanian reading another split is at work in and underwrites the split identified by Laclau between the particular content and universal possibilities for affinity implied in the demand. This supplementary split inheres between the subject who enjoys the mere fact of affinity with a group as a mode of (mis)identification and the set of identitarian equivalences inaugurated by investing in the specific content of the demand. Specific political demands contain a universal commitment that authorizes equivalential linkages and are simultaneously sites of enjoyment that create ritually repeated relationships to a hegemonic order. Based on this Lacanian reading, it is not the change that the demand anticipates, nor the political potential of forging equivalential links that is significant, but the role demand plays for the one who utters it and the modes of interpassive political affinity entailed that are of primary analytical importance. Working through the complexity of demands requires reading the demand for recognition as a practice of enjoyment—as an affectively invested call for sanction and love by the governing order. Demands also entail a perverse dialectic of political agency as resistance and simultaneous interpassive political constraint. Demands empower forms of political agency by generating an oppositional relationship to hegemonic structures and by providing the equivalential preconditions for identity. As Žižek might have it, there is always the risk that the demands of protestors are the supplement that authorizes the functioning of capital.27 Enjoyment provides one particularly difficult stumbling block for a dedicated formal account, a dynamic that stands out in particularly stark relief in Laclau’s work. Although Laclau owes a significant debt to Freud and Lacan, his theory of demand is not explicitly crafted from psychoanalytic categories. As Glynos and Stavrakakis have argued, there is a “complete and conspicuous absence in Laclau’s work of Lacanian categories such as fantasy, and, perhaps more importantly, jouissance.”28 Glynos and Stavrakakis claim that there is “to [their] knowledge no reference in Laclau’s work to the concept of jouissance.”29 On Populist Reason contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance in Copjec’s work, which Laclau summarizes by saying: “There is no achievable jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and hegemony is nothing more than the investment in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us. The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar, they are simply identical.”30 There is an elegance to Laclau’s point about enjoyment, provided that enjoyment is reducible to a set of logical forms. This presupposition makes the lack of talk about jouissance in Laclau’s work understandable. If jouissance and hegemony are identical, one does not need Lacan to say something that might be said more elegantly with Gramsci. But with Laclau’s insight on the formal similarities of enjoyment and hegemony come certain blind [blank] spots. To start with, enjoyment is never quite as “achievable” as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless enjoyment of one’s own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a subject in either finding grounding or consummating an authoritative account of its coherence. This “uselessness” defines the operation of jouissance. When Lacan suggests that “language is not the speaking subject” in the seminar On Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures of signification. Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the gristmill of speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is prefigured by logics of structure, meaning, and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization, is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance. Framing enjoyment as equivalent with hegemony, Laclau identifies the fundamental “split” in psychoanalytic theory between the universal and the particular demands of a group. Posing the split in this way, and as the privileged site of the political, Laclau occludes attention to another split: namely, the split within a subject, between the one who enters an equivalential relationship and the identitarian claim that sutures this subject into a set of linkages. This too is a site of enjoyment, where a subject identifies with an external image of itself for the sake of providing its practices of subjectivity with a kind of enjoyable retroactive coherence. The demand is relevant here but not simply because it represents and anticipates a change in the social order or because it identifies a point of commonality. The demand is also a demand to be recognized as a subject among other subjects and to be given the sanction and love of the Symbolic order. The implication of this argument about the nature of enjoyment is that the perverse dialectic of misfirings, failure, and surpluses in identity reveals something politically dangerous in not moving beyond demand. Put another way: not all equivalences are equally equivalent. Some equivalences become fetishes or points of identification that eclipse the ostensible political goal of the demand. To extend the line of questioning to its logical conclusion: can we be bound to our equivalential chains? Despite the tendency of some commentators to naturalize Freud’s tripartite schema of the human psyche, Freud’s account of the ego does not characterize the ego as preexistent or automatically given. The ego is not inevitably present in every human subject: the ego is a compensatory formation that arises in the usual course of human development as a subject negotiates the articulation and refusal of its needs as filtered through demand. Hypothetically a “subject” whose every need is fulfilled by another is never quite a subject: this entity would never find occasion to differentiate itself from the other who fulfills its every need. As a mode of individuation and subjectivization, egos are economies of frustration and compensation. This economy relies on a split in the Freudian demand, which is both a demand to satiate a specific need and a demand for the addressee to provide an automatic fulfillment of a need. The generative power of the demand relies on two things: the split between the demand and the need that it attempts to redress, and the fact that some demands will be refused. This economy of need and frustration works because the refusal of a specific need articulated as a demand on another is also a refusal of the idea that the addressee of the demand can fulfill all the subject’s needs, requiring a set of compensatory economic functions to negotiate the refusal of specific demands. “Ego,” then, names the economy of compensatory subjectivization driven by the repetition and refusal of demands. The nascent subject presents wants and needs in the form of the demand, but the role of the demand is not the simple fulfillment of these wants and needs. The demand and its refusal are the fulcrum on which the identity and insularity of the subject are produced: an unformed amalgam of needs and articulated demands is transformed into a subject that negotiates the vicissitudes of life with others. Put in the metaphor of developmental psychology, an infant lodges the instinctual demands of the id on others but these demands cannot be, and for the sake of development, must not be fulfilled. Thus, pop psychology observations that the incessant demands of children for impermissible objects (“may I have a fourth helping of dessert”) or meanings that culminate in ungroundable authoritative pronouncements (the game of asking never ending “whys”) are less about satisfaction of a request than the identity-producing effects of the parental “no.” In “The Question of Lay Analysis,” Freud argues that “if . . . demands meet with no satisfaction, intolerable conditions arise . . . [and] . . . the ego begins to function.... [T]he driving force that sets the vehicle in motion is derived from the id, the ego . . . undertakes the steering. . . . The task of the ego [is] . . . to mediate between the claims of the id and the objections of the external world.”31 Later, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud relocates the site of the ego’s genesis beyond the parent/child relationship and in the broader social relationships that animate it. Life with others inevitably produces blockages in the individual’s attempts to fulfill certain desires, since some demands for the fulfillment of desires must be frustrated. This blockage produces feelings of guilt, which in turn are sublimated as a general social morality. The frustration of demand is both productive in that it authorizes social moral codes and, by extension, civilization writ large, although it does so at the cost of imposing a contested relationship between desire and social mores.32 Confronted by student calls to join the movement of 1968 Lacan famously quipped: “as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!” Understanding the meaning of his response requires a treatment of Lacan’s theory of the demand and its relationship to hysteria as an enabling and constraining political subject position. Lacan’s theory of the demand picks up at Freud’s movement outward from the paradigmatic relationships between the parent/ child and individual/civilization toward a more general account of the subject, sociality, and signification. The infrastructure supporting this theoretical movement transposes Freud’s comparatively natural and genetic account of development to a set of metaphors for dealing with the subject’s entry into signification. As already noted, the Lacanian aphorism that “the signifier represents a subject for another signifier inverts the conventional wisdom that a pre-given subject uses language as an instrument to communicate its subjective intentions.”33 The paradoxical implication of this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. An Es assumes an identity as a subject as a way of accommodating to the Symbolic’s demands and as a node for producing demands on its others or of being recognized as a subject.34 As I have already argued, the demand demonstrates that the enjoyment of one’s own subjectivity is useless surplus produced in the gap between the Es (or it) and the ideal I. As a result, there is excess jouissance that remains even after its reduction to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the self that produces the subject and therefore conditions possibility for investment in an identitarian configuration. The site of this excess, where the subject negotiates the terms of a nonrelationship with the Symbolic, is also the primary site differentiating need, demand, and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a precursor to demand. Demand is the filtering of the need through signification, but as Sheridan notes, “there is no adequation between need and demand.”35 The same type of split that inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, although in Lacan’s case it is crucial to notice that the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Thus, the speci- ficity of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfill the demand. This impossibility points to the paradoxical nature of demand: the demand is less a way of addressing need to the other than a call for love and recognition by it. “In this way,” writes Lacan, “demand annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love.”36 The Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the Symbolic. The structural impossibility of fulfilling demands resonates with the Freudian demand in that the frustration of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.”37 This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift that it does not have, namely the gift of love: “all demand implies . . . a request for love. . . . Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other . . . having no universal satisfaction. . . . It is this whim that introduces the phantom of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is installed.”38 This framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. Contemporary and classical liberal democratic theories presume that the demand is a way of exerting agency and, further, that the more firmly the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the more firmly one lodges a demand, the more desperately one clings to the legitimate ability of an institution to fulfill it. Hypothetically, demands ought reach a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a response should produce a reevaluation of the economy of demand and desire. In analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The result of this “subtraction” is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire, not as a set of deferrals, avoidances, or transposition but rather as an owned political disposition. As Lacan frames it, demanding subjects are either learning to reassert the centrality of their demand or coming to terms with the impotence of the Other as a satisfier of demands: “But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love and the test of desire that development is ordered. . . . [T]his test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it.”39 The point of this disposition is to bring the subject to a point where they might “recognize and name” their own desire and, as a result, become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something without being dependent on the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. Thus, desire has both a general status and a specific status for each subject. It is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: “Lacan is sure that everyone’s desire is somehow different and their own—lack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language . . . passing through demand into desire, something from the Real, from the individual’s being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and everywhere. Lacan terms this objet petit a . . . petit a is different for everyone; and it can never be in substitutes for it in which I try to refind it.”40 Though individuated, this naming is not about discovering a latently held but hidden interiority, rather it is about naming a practice of thinking the uniqueness of individual subjects as a product of discourses that produce them. Thus, this is an account of political subjectivization that is not solely oriented toward or determined by the locus of the demand but that is also determined by the contingent sets of coping strategies that orient a subject toward others and a political order and serve as the condition of possibility for demands. As Lacan argues, this is the point where a subject becomes a kind of new presence or a new political possibility: “That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn’t a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. . . .In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.”41 Alternatively, subjects can stay fixated on the demand, but in doing so they forfeit their desire, or as Fink argues, “an analysis . . . that . . . does not go far enough in constituting the subject as desire leaves him or her stranded at the level of demand . . . unable to truly desire.”42