4. The aff’s call to action misdiagnoses the problem—reject their calls to publicly remember the exact things they criticize—that’s a form of repression that turns the case

The big question, the 'million dollar question,' that necessarily arises here is, of course, this: can this singular type of tie function as the ground of any social tie, or is the latter always based on the repression of the former? I will not answer this question here, but will say something else instead. If there is any intrinsic politics of psychoanalysis, it consists in insisting on its work of unbinding and of separation (in the sense sketched out above), and in not succumbing to the following criticism, which is becoming louder and louder: psychoanalysis only disintegrates, dismantles, separates, it is obsessed with negativity and lack, it never amounts to any affirmative, positive project (be it political or simply 'human'). The politics of psychoanalysis today should be to not yield to this (by trying to 'nevertheless' propose something 'positive'), but to pursue its work of analysis which has always had an intrinsically social character. Does this mean that psychoanalysis has to abstain from passing any kind of social judgment and to uncritically accept, if not even actively support, the contemporary disintegration of social ties, the crumbling of solidarity and of collective projects, the spectacle of the social tissue breaking into tiny pieces, small individual islands of enjoyment? I believe that it has to do something else, namely to critically examine this diagnosis itself, the diagnosis that should raise suspicion already on account of its being so gladly embraced by everybody, by those on the right and those on the left, by the rich and the poor, the religious and the not religious, the exploited and the exploiters. Do we really live in the times of an accelerated dissolution of the social ties and of the emergence of an untied multitude of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment? What if this diagnosis itself is a form of repression, a 'compromise formation' fiercely criticizing a certain content (the criticism of which is utterly acceptable) in order to avoid the real source of the problem? What we could say, for example, is this: the existence of the multiplicity of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment is precisely the form of existence of the contemporary social link. The socio-economic mobilization of lndividuals may not take the same form as 100 or 200 years ago, yet this is not to say that it does not take place and that we are not - as individuals with our own way of enjoyment - very much engaged in 'feeding' the present social link, which binds us to itself, and to each another. Here we should stress again what we have already indicated: that perhaps the crucial mistake lies in the fact that we are too fast and too willing to understand enjoyment as something essentially 'atavistic,' solipsistic, or simply a-social, cut off from the field of the Other. Contrary to this, we should recognize the point where - through the dialectics of repression and its maintenance - enjoyment is very much linked to the Other and is always-already social. More precisely: the subject of enjoyment does not need the Other, except at the point where the latter, with its 'bare' existence, guarantees the repression that the enjoyment 'needs' in order to emerge as enjoyment.