IS J.D. VANCE REALLY A LACANIAN?

The struggle should go on at this level: the capitalist superego is embedded in a complex network of social and ideological relations.

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Aleksandr Dugin’s influence should not be overrated: he advocates for an extreme new Eurasian empire dominated by Russian Orthodoxy through military victory, and his supporters consider Putin too soft. However, what Dugin writes should be followed as an indicator of neo-fascist dangers. In a short text from September 2024, Dugin does something that shocked even me, accustomed as I am to all kinds of surprises in theory and politics: he applies Lacan’s triad of Real/Symbolic/Imaginary to analyze the roles of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the forthcoming U.S. presidential elections. Here is how Dugin presents the triad RSI:

“The Real is the domain where every object is strictly identical to itself. This absolute identity (A=A) excludes the very possibility of becoming, i.e., of being in a state of transformation. Thus, the Real is the zone of pure death and nothingness. There are no changes, movements, or relations. The Real is true, like the truth of nothingness that has no alternatives.

The Symbolic is the domain where nothing equals itself, where one thing always refers to another. It is an escape from the Real, motivated by the desire to avoid death and falling into nothingness. It is here that content, relationships, movements, and transformations are born, but always in a dreamlike state. The Symbolic is the unconscious. The essence of a symbol is that it points to something other than itself (it does not matter what specifically, as long as it is not itself).

The Imaginary is the domain where the dynamic of the Symbolic stops, but without the object dying and collapsing into the Real. The Imaginary is what we mistakenly take for Being, the world, ourselves—nature, society, culture, and politics. It is everything, yet it is also a lie. Every element of the Imaginary is actually a frozen moment of the Symbolic. Wakefulness is a form of sleep that does not realize itself. Everything in the Imaginary refers to the Symbolic but presents itself as supposedly ‘Real.’