Welcome?

Isolda Alvarez

Member of WAP, NLS, Lacanian Compass
USA, NEL

texto inédito para AMP Blog

Lacanian psychoanalysis does not wager,
believe, nor is it interested in the psychoanalysis of the masses.
Psychoanalysis is done one-on-one. However, this does not mean that psychoanalysts
cannot have something to say about the mass phenomena currently taking place,
among other things, because masses are made of speaking beings who each identify
with a specific trait creating an illusion of unity in what we call the group
phenomenon.

Recently, the
President of the United States with the support of the Attorney General,
approved a Family Separation Law applicable to all immigrants who cross the
border, including those who are seeking asylum.

The Attorney
General, in an attempt to defend such position, cited a biblical text trying to
support his argument. The President made a statement recently by signing an
executive order that « puts an end » to the family separation policy which
he had approved with the support of his administration. It is expected that no
more families will be separated with the executive order, but nothing has been
said of the change of status or reinstatement of conditions of freedom for the
more than 2,300 children currently detained. The decision to sign that order
arises in response to the global and local protests generated from the
relentless application of this « Law ».

Although it is
not a secret that the United States has had policies in place throughout
history that supported segregation and racism, it is also well known that
important battles have been won in this respect, which have reinstated basic
Human Rights: the abolition of slavery, the end of the policy « separate
but equal », among others.

This means that
it is not new for the United States to approve policies that support racism, or
in politically correct terms, for the country to implement policies aimed at
protecting « National Security » at any cost, especially when the cost
results in the segregation of a large part of the population. The Attorney General
and the President have shown in their arguments that this is deep down an issue
of racism. In their own words, the Central American population is « harmful
and dangerous » to the United States.

This population
(which is the one  targeted today, tomorrow
will surely be another one) remains in the role of the enemy. For the American people
(approximately 37%) that still support and agree with these policies, these immigrants
represent « the stranger » that Zygmunt Bauman proposed in his work Modernity and Ambivalence; the stranger
is that person who is unfamiliar and still unknown … but this rarity has a
dark side: when a person is placed outside, at the margins of society, they
constitute a constant threat. They are a threat within the imaginary order for
those who fear them, but with the possibility of becoming a threat that personifies
the Real at stake as seen in the case of terrorist attacks (domestic and
international ones, and more recently in the proliferation of mass school shootings).

Following some
of the proposals given by Eric Laurent in his text Disruption of Jouissance in the Follies under Transference, and taking into account the Freudian
formulations on racism, I wonder if this « Policy of separation of families »
inhabits at its core a « hate toward the other »[1]. In this article, Laurent
reminds us of Miller’s indications about this: « In the hate toward the
Other, it is true that there is something more than aggression. There is a
constant of that aggressiveness that deserves the name of hate, and that points
towards the real in the Other. What makes that Other an Other so that he can be
hated… so that he can be hated in his being? And well, it is the hate of the jouissance
of the Other. It is here where we can give the most general form to this modern
racism, [at least] this is what we can verify. It is hate in the particular jouissance
of the Other »[2]

Lacan warns
about the re-emergence of a radical racism during that interview that we know
as Television when he responds to a
questions regarding this issue, and he points out that the future will bring
the crudest forms of racism, raising the threatening possibility of the return
of a nefarious past.[3]

Psychoanalytically
speaking, it has been the only aspect that allows us to locate the excessiveness
of the policies that have been implemented regarding this Central American
population (without referring to all the other populations that fall into this
spectrum under various « forms » of « executive » policies that
are being « signed » and approved quite frequently).

And it is precisely that « excessiveness » that has caused certain
sectors of the North American community to make a statement through an act,
which apparently the international community seems to be able to read – at
least in this particular case of the « Policy of separation of
families ». While it is true that this excess is covered by a law, the
paradox is that the law itself is excessive even when it was created within a
democratic system, at a historical moment in which it had been assumed – until
now – that the laws reinforced limits. In this particular case, it seems to be
a Law that represents the overflowing of jouissance that inhabits it, insofar
as it is a different jouissance that is taken in the form of an imminent threat
where the other remains in the radically imaginary place of the enemy.

It is no longer an exclusive
knowledge of psychoanalysts that language serves to lie, that semblants are
semblants and not absolute truths and that the millennium brought new forms of
ordering and a fierce push toward low blows in the place of the ideal. These
are the times of the Festival of Insignificance as Milan Kundera points out in
his last book.

Psychoanalysis has shown the havoc
effects that this generates and it is at the core of our ethics to take a stand
on these matters.