THE SHOOTING OF TRUMP

Trump is now elevated to the status of a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense of the term

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Who on Earth has not seen the photo of a defiant Trump with blood on his ear and cheek, being rushed off stage by Secret Service agents, fist raised with an American flag in the background? It became instantly iconic, and commentaries abound, with the Right claiming that the new Left, not the populist Right, is the true source of violence, and the Left pointing out the hypocrisy of governments like the Israeli one which emphasize how nothing can justify violence in politics while committing mass murder in Gaza and the West Bank. The Left has a point - let me mention just a single scandalously underreported fact: a couple of days ago, the globally-known Palestinian poet and activist Hanan Awwad was stopped by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in East Jerusalem; she was detained for four hours, subjected to verbal abuse, called a terrorist, and kicked and struck… The reason? She was repeatedly interrogated about the content of her published writings. Big media totally ignored this event, and it is sad that there was no one with an iPhone to record it – the clip should and, hopefully, would be much more iconic than that of Trump with a bleeding right ear.

But I think one should here take a step back and address the underlying question: where does the obsession and fascination with the figure of Trump come from? To cut a long story short, Trump is now elevated to the status of a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. What is a fetish? Jacques Lacan wrote that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological: the pathological element is the husband's need for jealousy as the only way to retain his dignity, identity even. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls…) – which they are not, of course -, their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic Whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew is a displacement and condensation of social antagonisms; it is the last thing an anti-Semite sees before he would be confronted with a naked social antagonism.

The notion of fetishism does not apply only to the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism: the same holds for the Israeli-Zionist fascination with Hamas and especially with Yahya Sinwar as an agent of abyssal evil that no context can explain: Hamas is the last thing a Zionist sees before confronting the actual antagonism that underlies the Israel-Palestinian conflict. And the same holds also for the fascination with Netanyahu-Smotrich-BenGvir that permeates our liberal media: this troika functions as a fetish which allows the Western liberal to contain what is wrong with Israel to a minority of fundamentalist fanatics who spoil the innocent Zionist project, i.e., to avoid confronting the much more unsettling fact that the notion of Israel from the river to the sea is inscribed into the basic Zionist problem (today, over 80% of Jews in Israel support it).

The liberal fascination with Trump is clearly also such a fetish which obfuscates the liberals’ own fateful limitation. In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today: the only way to really defeat Trump and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse. In this sense, the image of Donald Trump is the last thing a liberal sees before confronting class struggle. That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.

The ultimate ideological cause of these failures is a complex network of ideas, institutions, and economic trends, but one should not bypass a more “abstract” feature: the permissive Left liberalism remains firmly within the confines of the logic of the Good, of moderation and health, opposing all forms of passionate excess – or, as Todd McGowan put it: “what the Right gets right: exceeding the Good.” Such a stance is not just political, it applies also to sexuality – here is a CNN report on the Paris Olympics:

“The Olympics have long promoted safe sex. Now it wants to focus on pleasure. Prioritizing pleasure in sexual health refers to the approach of celebrating the physical and mental benefits of sexual experiences as well as minimizing the risks. It aims to rewrite fear and shame narratives that cast sex as taboo, with sexual health organizations promoting the sex-positive method as fundamental for unlocking greater agency over sexual rights and well-being.”

Such a positive attitude seems OK: why just negative warnings, why should we not highlight sexuality as a positive pleasurable experience? However, what we are getting here is a shift from sex to pleasure, from the excesses of sexual passion to a pleasure which is controlled, domesticated, justified by its positive effects… In short, we get pleasure without the excess of jouissance, sex that serves health and well-being. In Freudian terms, we get the pure reign of the pleasure-principle (and its immanent supplement, the reality-principle): the goal is pleasure, but pleasure must be controlled and moderated so that it doesn’t turn into pain and self-destruction. We get what is missing here, the dimension of what Freud called “beyond the pleasure-principle,” in the Rightist populism, we get passion in all its excesses, and they are right here: only through our different passionate engagement will something new emerge.

No wonder, then, that the ultimate stance of the Left today in the developed West is melancholy – more precisely, a very specific notion of melancholy best exemplified by Hanns Eisler, Schoenberg’s pupil and the most important composer of the German Democratic Republic. Eisler was of course deeply perturbed by the Stalinist oppression which he experienced as a burden thwarting his creativity (as it is clearly shown in his late song cycle “Schwere Gedichte” which celebrates the de-Stalinization after 1956). However, at a more subtle level, he was aware that the process of de-Stalinization (Khrushchev’s “thaw”) destabilized the entire system, depriving Communists of an authority which imposes a firm ideal that defines the party line – to put it in Hegelian terms, with de-Stalinization, the Communist project was in itself already dead, and the awareness of THIS fact caused his melancholy… And this is how the Left functions: although the Leftists know that the predominant models of the Left (really-existing Socialism, social-democratic welfare state) are irretrievably lost, they are simultaneously aware that there is no global viable Socialist project discernible – that’s why all the passion is on the side of new Rightist populists.

And that’s why Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential candidate was very appropriate (for him). In his bestselling Hillbilly Elegy (2016) Vance expresses the worldview that sustains the new Rightist populism; this autobiographical memoir tells the story of a poor white working-class hero in destitute Appalachia who fights his way to success in a family full of violence and alcohol, with a drug-addicted mother. He succeeds and becomes a millionaire with hard work, against the constant bickering of the big state and corporations which support lazy self-proclaimed “victims” who lead a more comfortable life than the poor honest white workers… False and full of clichés as this book is, Vance’s story is told with a deep personal engagement: his lies are part of the actual life, in contrast to white-liberal condescending care for the destitute marginals. This feature of Vance is much more dangerous than his stance on Ukraine, Europe, and Israel - the way to beat Trump is not by shooting him dead but by offering the public a better and more engaging narrative that will appeal to the subjective experience of millions. Is this still possible in our era of total media manipulation?