The Scene of Politics in an Atonal World: Hegemony, Contagion, Spectrality

A powerful injection of Lacanian theory in the study of political thought has paved the way for new perspectives in the analysis of today’s world and new tools for thinking political subjectivation. The outcome has been the formulation of a more complex, dynamic and relational ontology that re-opens the field of the political. This is precisely what is needed in an immanentist scene, made fully present through the convergence of neoliberal governmental technique and Deleuzian naturalism. Through Lacan’s theories we gain an improved perspective of the productivity of negativity, of the not-All, of contingency, in opposition to a dominant imaginary that, in the neoliberal as well as in the neo-Spinozian version, is pure affirmativeness, expressiveness without ‘judgment’ and without representative duplicity. Lacan’s thought might redirect political theory toward processes of subjectivation. In such a way, the centrality of the latter might emerge precisely into the biopolitical turn of neoliberal governmentality, shifting the scene of politics into individual lives; within their internal structuring. The ‘desired’ consequence is that the scene of politics becomes non-visible, ob-scene, and the split that runs through it invisible. The displacement of the scene of politics within the process of subjectivation itself makes it difficult, if not impossible, to bring it into focus. What is seen of the political is irrelevant, gaping, irritating. It is therefore essential to re-enact the political on scene, in full visibility, opening the governed subject, politically and yet not representatively constructed, in order to highlight the power relations that operate within his bios and his living existence. Subjectivation processes, then. But it is also essential that due consideration be given to how these processes have changed, to how governmentality produces subjectivities that are different from those – neurotic and highly identitarian – to which political theory and even psychoanalysis have grown accustomed. Indeed, it is essential that due consideration be given to how even governmentality’s modus of influence—government—shifts towards modal relations rather than subjects, doing so with the effect of rendering them ever more blurred. This is the aim of the present essay.