Refuse to comment on the 1ac—their desire for recognition for being “good enough” is exactly the problem

The great challenge that psychoanalysis poses for emancipatory politics — and for politics as such — is its absolute rejection of the good or the good society. In the opening of the Politics, Aristotle describes the good as the basic aim of political activity, and this aim has remained constant in the intervening 2,500 years.7 Aristotle never attempts to prove this constitutive remark in his treatise but simply takes it as an unassailable postulate of political thinking. For subsequent political thinkers, the question does not concern Aristotle’s claim about the good but in what the good consists. There is unanimity about the political pursuit of the good not just among political theorists but among almost everyone who thinks about politics at all. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, however, there is no good at all. The good society is unattainable not just as a result of the competing desires of the individuals within the society. The theory that aligns social conflict with the coexistence of competing individual desires fails to go far enough in envisioning the antagonistic nature of the social order. No matter how divergent individual desires are, one could always imagine reconciling them with each other through some sort of compromise. A thinker such as John Rawls can imagine a just society despite positing a society divided by innumerable competing desires on the level of the individual. Justice here would consist in the idea of fairness — using one’s imagination to envision society through what Rawls labels a “veil of ignorance” that allows one to make decisions about justice without taking into account one’s individual interests or desires or social position. This would facilitate a good society in which any inequality would be socially justifi ed, and it would thus reconcile competing individual desires with each other. Introduction But the barrier to the good society runs deeper than this. It derives from the very idea of the good, which Freud sees as fundamentally at odds with itself. The good itself, not our failures to achieve it, is the problem. This is the fundamental political insight that psychoanalysis brings to the table. It is at once the challenge that it poses to emancipatory politics and the basis for its implicit project for emancipation. As we get closer to the ideal of a good society, we simultaneously approach the emptiness concealed within the ideal. The notion of the good does not emerge simply from moral reasoning and speculation about the proper arrangement of society. We develop this notion only through the experience of its prohibition. That is to say, the prohibition of the good doesn’t form an obstacle to a preexisting ideal but constitutes the ideal as such. The good has no existence outside of the barriers that we erect around realizing it. As Jacques Lacan points out in one of his most important political statements, “The step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good — that the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.”9 The foundational link between the good and prohibition renders its pursuit completely contradictory. Every step toward the good occasions a corresponding step away from it. Th e closer we come, the more we undermine the social stability that we hoped to achieve. This occurs not just among the many utopian socialist projects that have failed but across all types of social structures. For psychoanalysis, the good is not just an unrealizable ideal but a deception incapable of orienting a coherent and sustainable politics. Th is critique threatens to undermine the very idea of a political project because political theorists write in order to help bring about change, which means moving society in the direction of the good (even if they admit that the ideal itself is not realizable). Conservative theorists seem immune to this critique, but they envision a return to the good or the creation of a social stability that they associate implicitly with the good.10 Political theorists of all stripes write to change the world and assist its progression (or its return to a better state), whereas psychoanalysis interprets the world and uncovers the repetition at work where it seems to be progressing. For this reason, Julia Kristeva theorizes the political project inherent in Introduction psychoanalysis as one of permanent revolt. Rather than forming a positive program, psychoanalysis, like modernist literature, exists simply as a negation of identity and power. In The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, she argues, “psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and a certain literature, on the other, perhaps constitute possible instances of revolt culture.” From Kristeva’s point of view, psychoanalysis is completely political insofar as it demands revolt, but this revolt can never become revolution. Psychoanalytic revolt is destined to remain revolt against some existing power structure toward which it will continue to provide resistance. Kristeva views psychoanalytic thought as a hiccup in the hegemony of scientific rationality and progress. Any attempt to create a positive psychoanalytic politics would obviate its role as a key part of revolt culture.