Psychoanalysis isn’t universal and scaling it up to political conclusions is colonialist.

The presumption of a universal form of desire is an important starting point for the analyst of any patient who arrives on the couch in the psychoanalytic clinic. The psychoanalyst can only offer certain parameters, with all their limitations. The patient, if the analyst allows for an interrogation of their own forms of resistance, however, can speak back to any frame of desire that the analyst presumes or proposes. And the analyst—if Jacques Lacan’s thoughts on resistance are taken seriously (Lacan, 2007, p. 497; Rogers, 2016, pp. 183–187)—must listen, attend, learn, and adapt. But when the desires of subjects are extended into the political realm, when the wants and needs of every subject are presumed to articulate with a psychoanalytic notion of universal desire, then something is lost. That something might be called the desire of the other, or it might not be called desire at all.

The desire of the other is not easily seen in the wake of European Enlightenment that has engulfed the imagination of psychoanalytic and political theorists and practitioners alike. It is not easily seen, and it is not easily conversed with when epistemological work presumes a trajectory of desire and then applies it. In this application, there is little space for a radically other performance of politics as action or imagination to appear. The subject who is subsumed into this imagination—the subject Gayatri Spivak (1996)1 describes as “the Other of Europe”—has little opportunity to do more than “utter” under the weight of its imagined subjectivity. As Spivak (1999) says:

[I]n the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary—not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. (p. 266)

Psychoanalysis is as guilty of exercising such a form of “great care” as many of the occupations of French intellectuals that Spivak has criticized for doing so. Psychoanalysis, with its attention to the many forms of the unconscious, can appear otherwise than guilty of this. It can appear more open, generous, and curious about the many forms that desire can take. In its later forms of attention to a politically constituted “symbolic order” under the guidance of Lacan (2007), it can also appear more attentive to the particularities of desires informed by a politics of the time. I argue here, however, that attention is already constituted by an imagination of a subject who wants, who needs, who desires objects, things, rights, in a mode which cannot not start from a point of origin, and a particular political form of origin which then precludes the recognition—in both the clinic and in political analysis2 —of other forms of desire, “with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary.” When practices such as political psychoanalysis presume a particular form of desire, what is at stake in this constitution of desire is the political subject or the Other of Europe who cannot “speak,” in Spivak’s terms. What is lost might be called radical desire; it might be an itinerary which is cathected or invested otherwise, and, as such, it might not be recognizable in psychoanalysis or in contemporary political psychology at all.

The nonrecognition of the Other of Europe, in her many forms, is a consistent political problem—documented often and insistently by critical race and postcolonial analysts such as Spivak, but also Sanjay Seth, Leila Gandhi, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ashis Nandy, Christine Black, and Homi Bhabha. Such nonrecognition, however, when repostulated in political psychoanalysis has another effect. The trajectory of the symptoms of political practice—including desires for law, justice, particular election outcomes, rights, socioeconomic configurations, or even for the formation of political structures themselves (democracy being only one)— presume a form of desire that refers to, and endures in, its constitution. As Spivak (1999) notes in her critique of power and desire as universal:

[S]o is “desire” misleading because of its paleonomic burden of an originary phenomenal passion—from philosophical intentionality on the one hand to psychoanalytic definitive lack on the other. (p. 107)

The psychoanalytic definitive lack she speaks of refers to the Lacanian configuration of desire as always attempting to recover, to master, to instantiate an identity that is supposedly interminably lost as soon as language acts upon the subject. This lack is inaugurated through the subjects relation to what it cannot have, or, in Spivak’s terms, the “originary phenomenal passion” referring to the oedipal scene, which is presumed to be the origin of desire for all. This configuration of desire renders all subjects desiring of overcoming that lack. But it is a particular form of desire and a particular quality of lack. The presumption of this quality—the presumption about what and how people desire—I argue here, must be accountable to the politico-historical configurations which have produced it.

Politico-historical configurations, by definition, are not universal. That is, contra Zizek (2006), I argue that not all the world is a symptom, but that any psychoanalysis of a political symptom, of a political subject, or of the desires examined through psychoanalysis as they emerge in a political arena, assume a particular formation of desire. And that such an analysis operates within the parameters and employs the understandings of the oedipal scene, or, simply of a subjectivity split by language, including the language of law. As Lacan (2006) says “language begins along with law” (p. 225). While this split subjectivity may appear to be universal—and is convincingly employed as such by psychoanalytic and political theorists, and often philosophers (Butler, 1997; Epstein, 2013; Zevnik, 2016; Zizek, 2006), this splitting refers specifically to an oedipal lineage, as a particular instantiation of Oedipal Law, and, as I argue positive law as a liberal law concerned with rights and with what once can or cannot have from the polis as much as what one can take from the father. Thus the “originary phenomenal passion,” which a psychoanalysis of the political engages, always refers back as I will explain, to a (primal) father as a sovereign in a wrangle with his sons, a scene which itself cannot not be understood without its resonances to the French Revolution.