By SAMIR GANDESHA*

Everything that is not well assimilated, or infringes the commands on which the progress of centuries has been sedimented, is felt as intrusive and awakens a compulsive aversion.

1.

It can be said that contemporary neoliberal capitalism is characterized by two very significant negative aspects: increased income and wealth inequality, and the growth of right-wing political movements.

On the one hand, there has been a dramatic increase in social and economic inequality since the mid-1970s. For example, since 1977, sixty percent of the increase in US national income, according to Thomas Piketty, has gone to the richest ten percent of the population. Given the current constellation of forces and trends, such as increased investment in fixed capital and technical innovation that intensifies automation, this inequality will only increase in the years and decades to come.

On the other hand, instead of a robust and radically democratic challenge to the enormous growth of inequality that is shaking the very foundations of the political order, support for populist and authoritarian political movements is growing throughout Europe and North America. By authoritarian populist movements we mean those that oppose the liberal forces currently in power and that claim to represent the will of the people, the latter understood in very narrow ethno-nationalist terms.

One example is the dramatic advance of the National Front in France, which emerged victorious in the first round of the regional elections in December 2015 – an advance that was halted in the second round by tactical voting by the French Socialists.

In the meantime, the US has witnessed the rise of the so-called “alt-right” and the election of Donald Trump as president based on an openly racist agenda. Deeply xenophobic, this political actor explicitly sought to attack immigration through Mexico; in addition, he proposed a complete ban on Muslims entering the country.

How can we explain this strange and deeply worrying conjunction of deepening socioeconomic inequality and the rise of authoritarian populism, that is, ethno-nationalist extremism? Militant left commentators such as Stathis Kouvelakis have argued that neo-fascist political parties are anti-systemic movements that nevertheless seek to preserve the existing order based on property relations.

Here is how he argues: “Yet it is precisely this aspect of the National Front – its ability to capture and ‘hegemonize’ a form of popular revolt – that gives it strength. Therefore, any ‘republican front’ strategy, whether partial or total, can only feed it, legitimizing its discourse of ‘us against everyone else’, as well as its self-proclaimed status as the only force that opposes ‘the system’ – even if it does so radically.”

According to Stathis Kouvelakis, the National Front has been able to enjoy this success precisely because it occupies a terrain that has been almost completely abandoned by the anti-capitalist left. The latter has become incapable of challenging the existing power bloc through its own counter-hegemonic project. Only through such a project could a legitimate alternative to neoliberal capital in general and austerity in particular be created.

In contrast, social democrats such as Jürgen Habermas, in his recent writings on the deepening crisis in Europe, argue that the crisis is a result of political institutions. To be more precise, for him it is a problem that can be understood as a lack of adequate political institutionalization: a eurozone without common foreign and fiscal policies, and without a legal order that could be considered as the embodiment of the public will of a genuinely post-national constellation.

For Jürgen Habermas, it is not a question of overcoming capital, but of bringing economic and political subsystems under the control of symbolically mediated forms of communication within the lifeworld. However, as has been seen in recent years, the crucial question of whether it is possible to speak of a single European lifeworld shared by northern and southern Europe, Germany and Greece, still has no good answer. As Jürgen Habermas himself states: “since 1989-90, it has become impossible to escape capitalism; the only remaining option is to civilize or tame its dynamics from within.”

What seems to be missing from both accounts of the crisis is the need to explain the people’s growing susceptibility to authoritarian solutions. They have been scorning radically democratic solutions to the crisis of the capitalist social order. And this crisis ultimately threatens liberal democracy not from without, but from within.

So the question arises: is the crisis simply one of politics and ideology? Is it simply a crisis of failed or incomplete institutionalization? Or is the crisis deeper than that and related to the formation of democratic subjectivity itself? Apart from isolated and sporadic cases, why have citizens not been convincingly mobilized in civil society to transform an order characterized not only by growing inequality but also by catastrophic environmental destructiveness? Do we not now have a social order that calls into question its own continuity, that is, its long-term viability?

As I have suggested elsewhere, far from including the other in public discourse, authoritarian populist movements have effectively transformed immigrants, blacks, asylum seekers, and refugees into enemies, an existential threat to the “total way of life” of the previously assumed community.

See: as soon as this enemy is constructed through a language loaded with disgusted affection, which constitutes the other who came from outside as a strange presence (Unheimlich) and abject – therefore, as profoundly threatening. Since the other is posited as incapable of participating in common discourse, he must therefore be excluded – if necessary, violently – from the body politic.

What we have now is not very different from the tropes and images through which National Socialist propaganda portrayed Jews. Contemporary right-wing populism constitutes the other in dehumanizing terms designed to maximize public disgust and fear: images of disease, bodily waste, like insects and vermin that threaten to overwhelm and destroy the body politic. Thus posed, they can only be confronted by policies of exclusion that occasionally require the suspension of constitutional legality.

As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno suggested in the last year of World War II, this is a drive to eliminate those who appear non-identical in an attempt to bring things under the dominion of technical control. Thus, anything that appears to be out of control, or indeed that appears to be uncontrollable and remains so, provokes an automatic response of revulsion:

But anything natural that has not been absorbed into the order of useful things, that has not passed through the cleansing channels of the conceptual order – a stiletto that makes the teeth grind, the high taste that brings to mind dirt and corruption, the sweat that appears on the forehead of the different – ​​everything that is not well assimilated, or infringes the commands in which the progress of centuries has been sedimented, is felt as intrusive and awakens a compulsive aversion.

2.

These developments seem, at least at first glance, to profoundly contradict the justification for the neoliberal reconstitution of contemporary capitalist social relations, something that dates back at least to the mid-1970s. This justification claimed that the preponderance of market mechanisms would reorient social relations on solid, that is, free and rational, bases, configuring what Wendy Brown critically called the “commodification of democracy”.

These mechanisms have been understood in terms of rational choices based on the ability of individuals (as opposed to the ability of the “bureaucratic” state) to make decisions that maximize utility, for example in the areas of health care or education. This justification holds that the conditions of social life will in fact be much less burdened by atavism, xenophobic nationalism, racism, and sexism, in direct proportion to the preponderance of market rationality as the basis for allocating social goods. The market alone can smoothly achieve the kind of equilibrium that must always be counterbalanced to the irrationality of the state, of management, coordination, and control.

The supposedly enlightening function of neoliberalism at the level of the individual has clearly backfired, not only in Europe and North America but also in Narendra Modi’s so-called Gujarat model in the Indian subcontinent, insofar as the latter has also unleashed atavistic tendencies. Instead of contributing to the conditions under which agents can exercise their capacity to articulate their own interests autonomously and rationally, within the context of a genuine plurality of other interests, it has led to a very visible excess of aggression, humiliation and guilt.

Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe recently observed that “meritocratic neoliberalism favors certain personality traits while penalizing others.” Furthermore, he considered many of these traits to be clinically pathological. Neoliberal capitalism, in his view, encourages superficial reasoning, duplicity, and lying, as well as reckless and risky behavior, rather than autonomy and rational adherence to ever-changing norms.

Here’s how he argues: “Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can succeed if they just try hard enough, while reinforcing privilege and placing increasing pressure on its overworked and exhausted citizens. There are a growing number of failures who feel humiliated, guilty, and ashamed. We are constantly told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before; however, the freedom to choose outside the narrative of success is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are cast as losers or freeloaders who take advantage of our social security system.”

The proliferation of these psychological traits has arisen in tandem with the growth of authoritarian and exclusionary forms of extreme nationalism and xenophobia. The combined effect of these developments is to profoundly weaken democratic attitudes, practices, and institutions.

3.

In this article, I examine the extent to which it is possible to revisit the concept of the authoritarian personality (…). Adorno and the entire first generation of critical theorists sought to provide, through an appropriation of psychoanalysis and a more general cultural critique, an account that would encompass the crisis of subjectivity and thus of the social experience of their time. This critical effort was seen as a necessary corrective to materialist theories of the objective crisis of capitalism, which pointed to a radical transformation of capitalism, that is, to something that never, in the final analysis, happened. In the first sentence of Negative Dialectic, Adorno describes the non-occurrence of this event in the following way: “philosophy, which previously seemed obsolete, continues to live because the moment to overcome it has been lost”.

Today we are experiencing the need to make a return to the original effort of Critical Theory in the 1920s and 1930s. The psychoanalytic drive theory (Trieblehre) and concepts such as projective identification and repetition compulsion can again be considered necessary.

Here we are, in fact, faced with evidence that neoliberal policies not only do not work, but have effects that can be counterproductive and profoundly damaging, that is, economically self-destructive. Yet these policies continue to be pursued by states with redoubled fervor and recklessness whenever they fail. Moreover, even if there are notable exceptions, they have obtained almost total acquiescence from citizens.

How can we explain this paradox? Psychoanalysis provides us with important means. With it, we can at least locate the limits of the still prevailing understanding that a policy based on the notion of rational choice truly maximizes utility.

Psychoanalysis offers insights into how people actively and affectively participate, through powerful emotions of love and hate, in reproducing the conditions of their own domination and to the detriment of their own material interests. Consequently, psychoanalysis can also help identify the limits and possibilities of genuine democratic self-determination and will-formation.

For the first generation of Critical Theory, authoritarianism was the inverse and negative image of psychoanalysis. As Adorno suggests, it is “psychoanalysis in reverse”. While psychoanalysis aims to achieve a balance between the demands of morality and the rationally justifiable interests of the individual present in his desires, authoritarianism authorizes the full expression of libido under certain conditions and, in particular, aggression against others, especially those considered strangers. For the authoritarian, strangers embody Unhealthiness or strangeness, a term used here to describe something that feels strange but also very familiar.

Now, this instinctual manifestation is based on an identification with the aggressor. For, it can be said that this idea of ​​identification with the aggressor underpins the concept of authoritarian personality. This is what one of the most eminent English-language translators and interpreters of Adorno, Bob Hullot-Kentor, calls vademecum by Adorno – or, to put it another way, his touchstone.

Indeed, Adorno's preoccupation with the problem of identification with the aggressor after 1933 presented itself as an existential problem of how to resist the enormous pressures faced by any displaced person or refugee in adapting to his or her new homeland or place of refuge.

Referring both to his own situation and to the situation of those whose fate was much worse, in Dialectics of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer referred to an increasingly totalitarian order: “Everything must be used; everything must belong to them. The mere existence of the other is a provocation. Everything else “gets in the way” and must show its limits – the limits of limitless horror. No one who seeks shelter will find it; those who express what everyone longs for – peace, homeland, freedom – will be denied, just as nomads and traveling gamblers have always been denied their rights of domicile.”

Adorno refers to the connection between this existential reality that he faced in American exile and the development of the arguments of what would become his main book, Negative Dialectic. As he says in a lecture delivered to the University of Frankfurt on November 11, 1965, in which he discusses the Hegelian claim that the negation of negation results in positivity: “I cannot resist saying that my eyes were opened to the dubious nature of this concept of positivity only in emigration, where people found themselves under the pressure of the society around them and had to adapt to very extreme circumstances. In order to succeed in this process of adaptation, in order to do justice to what they were forced to do, they had to be told, by way of encouragement – ​​and thus be able to see the effort it cost them to identify with the aggressor – Yes, so-and-so is really very positive.”

After elaborating on this point, Adorno further said: “For this reason, therefore, we could say, putting it in dialectical terms, that what appears to be positive is essentially the negative, that is, the thing that is to be criticized.” In other words, what appears positive ultimately harbors the non-identical that it violently assimilates through the act of subsumption.

4.

So, in fact, the idea of ​​identification with the aggressor can be considered as the core of Adorno’s philosophy, of his negative dialectics, as a whole. The ability to engage in the work of criticism was itself based on the strength of the ego or on assuming the role of what Hannah Arendt called, following Bernard Lazare, a “conscious pariah.”

In what follows, I first discuss some of the central features of the authoritarian personality concept. I then outline some of the substantive criticisms made of the study itself, as well as some of its underlying psychological and sociological assumptions. If the authoritarian personality concept is to be made available for understanding the structure of contemporary neoliberal capitalist personality, two main criticisms in particular must be made already here.

The first is the original study’s reliance on the now questionable concept of state capitalism. It may be far from clear that we have entered, squarely, a period in which the state has simply withdrawn as unmediated market forces have reasserted themselves. But the claim about the resurgence or even persistence of the authoritarian personality may still be viable, if such a claim is articulated in a way that is sensitive to both the identity and the distinctive role of neoliberal governance in contemporary capitalist societies.

It can be argued that in the transition from the Keynesian to the neoliberal form of capitalism, the tendency towards authoritarianism has grown as there are increasing demands for a now intensified “repressive desublimation” – something, as we know, theorized by Marcuse as early as 1991 – combined with greater precarity and insecurity. There is a greater propensity to rely on the exclusionary social bond solidified by a powerful authority figure as the means by which such security can be re-established.

The libidinal bond established within the group, and thus a cathexis to the leader, manifests ambivalence—love of self also translates into hatred of the stranger. Surprisingly, in presentations of neoliberalism, predominantly influenced by Michel Foucault’s famous work on biopower and governmentality, there is little or no account of populist responses, both from the left and the right, to the deepening inequality and insecurity of the neoliberal order.

The second criticism is the original study’s reliance on a normative Freudian understanding of the process of ego formation through conflict with the father. This, I suggest, can in part be addressed by drawing somewhat more heavily on the original formulation of the heterodox psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi. Here the idea of ​​“identification with the aggressor”—which itself involves a constellation of the concepts of identification, introjection, and dissociation—is given emphasis in the pre-Oedipal phase of development in a way that does not marginalize the role of the mother in the process, as critics have accused Freud of doing. Moreover, Ferenczi suggests that the relationship with the authoritarian leader is not merely a libidinal bond, but is also an identification that is—so it can be seen—directly at odds with the interests of the followers in the context of a traumatic historical crisis.

If these two critiques can be convincingly advanced, then it may be possible to develop the idea of ​​a neoliberal personality, which may in turn allow us to sketch out a provisional answer to the question posed at the outset. That is, how might it be possible to reconstruct the concept of authoritarian personality in the context of a post-Keynesian neoliberal order? A provisional answer can be given here: by dismantling the structures of the Keynesian welfare state, neoliberalism heightens the sense of social insecurity, specifically by creating surplus populations, deepening socioeconomic inequality, and creating threats to cultural identity.

This is a process that Achille Mbembe, in his recent book critique of black reason, calls “becoming the Negro of the world.” By expanding the scope of negative liberty, largely through the expansion of exchange or market relations, while shrinking the sphere of democratic self-government or positive liberty, neoliberal policies encourage identification with an increasingly unequal postdemocratic social order rather than providing a robust challenge to it. As neoliberalism has emerged as a global phenomenon since 1990, this authoritarian logic has affected not only the United States; indeed, it has become a truly global phenomenon.

5.

We can now present the three moments of the presentation of Dialectic of Enlightenment on the formation of subjectivity in the new situation. In other words, it is necessary to see how identification, introjection and dissociation occur in the formation of the neoliberal personality.

First, faced with a social world marked by a Hobbesian war of all against all, a state of nature that is, in fact, the historical reality of capitalism, the individual must strengthen or harden himself in order to be able to compete against others and, therefore, survive.

He must subordinate himself and therefore identify himself precisely with the external imperatives of the prevailing performance principle of that order, becoming competitive in relation to other individuals. At the same time, for individuals to do this successfully, this adaptation to the outside must be introjected or internalized.

The individual must therefore renounce the claim to a full life. The psychic cost of this dialectic of identification and introjection of external forces in the interest of self-preservation consists in a decrease in the capacity of the ego to experience and, ultimately, to act. And this implies dissociation. The life that must be preserved at all costs becomes, paradoxically, a simple survival; it becomes a kind of death in life.

6.

I have tried to argue that some of the metapsychological weaknesses of the concept of the “authoritarian personality” can, at least in part, be overcome by means of the notion of identification with the aggressor as formulated by Sandor Ferenczi. I have also tried to indicate that the transformation of welfare state capitalism would have to be thought through a reconstructed conception of neoliberalism.

Obviously, the above discussion remains at a very preliminary stage. In any case, the tripartite structure of identification, introjection and dissociation can help us understand the paradox that, as inequality and social insecurity deepen, we are seeing the emergence not of a strong and radical democratic opposition, but of authoritarian parties and movements. How then can we understand the global rise of right-wing populism?

This can be done in the following way. The ongoing crisis conditions of the neoliberal order, combined with the deepening ecological crisis, make the neoliberal order radically insecure compared to the one it replaced, insofar as it arises through a reversal of formal and informal networks of solidarity and social security.

It is possible to argue that, while it has contributed to the accelerated modernization of the so-called BRIC states (countries as diverse as India, Russia, Brazil, and China), neoliberal globalization has, in general, had myriad adverse effects. Through an expansion of the sphere of negative freedoms associated with the market, the neoliberal order has increased both economic insecurity and cultural anxiety through three features in particular: the creation of surplus people, the rise of global inequality, and threats to identity.

At the same time, it has failed to reinforce and develop institutions in and through which people can control or determine their own destinies (i.e., positive liberty). The result is an experience of social insecurity and anxiety that ultimately contributes to forging the conditions in which certain groups are transformed into objects of fear and hatred. As a result, they are defined, through populist discourse, as political enemies or enemies of the people.

The experience of the neoliberal order can therefore be understood as profoundly traumatic. As a way of surviving these conditions of shock, subjects can be said to identify overwhelmingly – not with the radical democratic forces that constitute a robust challenge to such an order, under conditions of solidarity with others facing similar forms of structural exclusion – but, paradoxically, with the very social forces that maintain and benefit from these structures. It can be said that they internalize the guilt of the aggressor in the very conditions in which the crisis unfolds.

Defenders of neoliberalism, such as intellectuals from Mount Pellerin Society, most notably Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, suggested that irrational demands of citizens contributed to the crisis of the Keynesian order and such demands would have to diminish, or even be abolished, if the crisis were to be adequately addressed.

It is now clear that it is the white middle and working classes that have seen their fortunes decline precipitously over the past thirty years. This is undoubtedly why they form the core of Donald J. Trump’s support in the United States. And here we see the third aspect of identification with the aggressor: a dissociation from one’s own interests tends to occur. Can there be any doubt that a Trump presidency would imply – particularly if certain laws in force were repealed or brought to an end – a pronounced deepening of poverty for the majority that globalization has simply abandoned?

The mimetic identification of the weak with the strong seems to be an adopted survival strategy. The socially excluded can take vicarious pleasure in the intimidation of a US that expels Muslims and builds a wall on its southern border with Mexico to keep out “rapists, murderers and drug traffickers”; the proverbial “trash” produced by Mexican society, according to the Washington Post.

Thus, the neoliberal order with which individuals identify – which is increasingly abstract and anonymous in nature – does not present itself as such. Instead, it is concretized as a strong ethnic or national or perhaps even racial body. It manifests itself in the figure of a strong and decisive leader, [I] a leader who constitutes a force field against a local or foreign enemy. In addition, she stands against those who intend to defend the marginalized and the excluded.

Moreover, it is not only against such foreigners, but also against an increasingly venal political class. Indeed, as Moshe Postone has argued in his sharp analysis of anti-Semitism, this latter phenomenon represents, in a displaced, one-sided and reified form, a critique of capitalism insofar as the very abstract characteristics of this system reside in the stereotypical representation of the figure of the Jew.

Here is how Moshe Postone argued about Nazism: “Jews were rootless, international, and abstract. Modern anti-Semitism, then, is a particularly pernicious form of fetishism. Its power and danger result from its all-encompassing worldview that explains and shapes certain modes of anti-capitalist discontent in a way that leaves capitalism intact, attacking the embodiments of that social form.”

Today, it could be argued, new groups have come to occupy the place that was once reserved for Jews, sometimes alongside them. In the rhetoric of the contemporary “prophet of deceit” – as Richard Wolin called Donald J. Trump – the figure of the Jew is now joined by that of the Muslim and the Mexican. In fact, the place is being occupied by the immigrant, who also seems “rootless, international and abstract”. The constitution of neoliberal subjectivity implies making each person increasingly responsible for his or her own success or failure.

One of the most cutting epithets used by Donald Trump is “loser” [looser]. This, of course, puts more pressure on Trump supporters to blame their own success or failure on members of a strange or alien group that is present in their surroundings. What is ailing the United States is not deepening social and economic inequality combined with declining capital investment in businesses and public investment in infrastructure and schools.

No, no... on the contrary. The adversities come from the weakness, lack of determination and decision of previous politicians who were unable to eliminate the porosity of the borders, as well as the movement of foreigners across them.

*Samir Gandesha is a professor at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

Excerpts from the article “Identifying with the aggressor: from the authoritarian to neoliberal personality".constellations, 2018, p. 1-18.

Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.

Translator's note

[I] I don’t think we can completely agree with the author on this point. In fact, the neoliberal leader is not, above all, “strong and decisive” like the classic fascist leader. If he rails against the weakest, whom he calls “parasites,” he actually appears on the political scene as a successful opportunistic entrepreneur who, when governing, eliminates as much as possible the legal restrictions that supposedly impede the prosperity of entrepreneurs. His emblematic figure is that of the anti-establishment politician who preaches anarcho-capitalism.

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