Risk and Resistance

Education and Crisis

Agonistic theorists of democracy take as their starting point Nietzsche’s caustic diagnosis of modernity: namely, that individuals have come to experience systemic inequalities as persistently subjective, moralized, and psychological. From such a vantage point, late moderns tend toward two responses when faced with political inequities: either they appeal to an absolute truth in the face of a politics unmoored from principle, or they insist on moralized injury to defend claims to privileged status. Both responses bury dispute beneath a hasty, legitimizing narrative. If, as Wendy Brown argues, these responses are symptomatic of a “broken historical narrative to which we have not yet forged alternatives,” then agonists have sought to compensate this frayed narrative in two ways. ⁹ Ethical cultivation seeks to disabuse persons of their conviction in the “truth” of stable foundations while also cultivating the ability to sustain multiple attachments to community.

Rather uneasily, then, agonists seek to balance a critical skepticism of foundations against a passionate intervention in political practice. Bonnie Honig counters the first response with an appeal to the “paradox of politics.” Recognizing that it is all too easy to cast this problem as one of legitimation (that shuttles uneasily between the decisionist moment of founding and deliberating its legitimacy) or constitutionalism, Honig forsakes both the search for a universalizable moral standpoint and the constitutionalism that might formalize popular sovereignty. Instead, she recognizes that the paradox of politics recurs continuously and poses the challenge of “maintenance, not just [that of] new beginnings but preparation, receptivity, and orientation.” ¹⁰ Partially by intention, her account of how to engage such preparation is largely descriptive. If such a politics is composed of those who “actively but not uncritically” evaluate the remainders of life that might serve as spurs to a new identity, then cultivation begins with descriptively elaborating these remainders as alternative modes of being. ¹¹ Honig thus turns to a politics of becoming organized around “civic commitments to practices of agonistic respect and to an ethos of pluralization that . . . actively but not uncritically support[s] the efforts of new identities to come into being without prior guarantees about the rightness . . . of their claims.” ¹² Honig finds emergent rights—those rights claims emergent from democratic contest—to be exemplary of this politics even as she acknowledges their limited ability to speak specifically to those practices that would cultivate such emergence.

Lest the contests around emergent rights be construed entirely as a politics of extraordinary moments, other agonists have turned to those dispositions that might more clearly grapple with moralized injury (the second response outlined above). William Connolly’s early term of “agonistic respect” ¹³ as a respect for the competitive integrity of the “game” of politics has been variously glossed as “aversive respect” (to emphasize the split between interpretive aversion and subjective respect) ¹⁴ or “awe” (to capture a secularized wonder at the human capacity to create meaning). ¹⁵ Even so, agonists have struggled with the question of whether such a disposition is more than liberal respect ¹⁶ and what “supporting conditions” might enable it to be collectively held and expressed. ¹⁷ Even as agonists have some pedagogical intent—to encourage people to be more responsive, attentive, open—it remains unspecified how such ethical dispositions are to be cultivated. As has been noted elsewhere, the turn to ethical disposition finds itself immediately confronted with the dissipation of political activity. ¹⁸ Indeed, where Stephen White argues that late moderns might “vivify our sense of mortality,” Honig presses that we should seek experiences of “lived vulnerability and exposure,” by seeking out opportunities for “service, mutuality, or action in concert.” Immediately, however, the challenge is to determine when such willful self-exposure transforms, when it simply plunges persons back into the grip of self-mastery, and whether such self-chastening could ever be sufficiently radical as to alter one’s relation to norm or ideal. More pointedly, these exchanges reflect the need for greater precision on the activities of risk and resistance, and the conditions under which these become transformative rather than enervating.

Honig herself reaches for a different frame. Driven, perhaps, by her own focus on western (re)founding and the concomitant concern for the integrity of democratic order, she turns instead to the exchange between Kant and Moses Mendelssohn ¹⁹ —an exchange framed around the life span of democratic survival. With all its ruptures and discontinuities, democratic survival entails not just enduring the aftermath of emergent moments, but finding a way to inhabit them with integrity. Such a move allows her to hold on to Mendelssohn’s insight that at any point in human history, “‘man’ is ‘child, adult, and old man at the same time, though in different places and regions of the world.’” With plural timelines, and plural and varied perspectives, “individuation” becomes something that “involves resistance” as generations differently define and defend liberty against servitude. ²⁰ Where Honig emphasizes such resistances as collectively experienced, David Owen and Tracy Strong have turned the metaphor of “maturity” into a model by which to contain and orient ethical growth. ²¹ Such a model accomplishes two ends. First it offers a particularist frame for persons to find themselves into community—to call into question and still give an account of Honig’s “beginnings.” And second, the pliancy of this metaphor accommodates the vagaries of development. Maturity alternately can be defined as against a child-like moral innocence to lose, or as an ideal of tragic perspective to achieve. It would seem to offer a collective ideal that is also a moral one. Across all of these formulations, resistance (as that which binds and divides political community, as well as persons against themselves) becomes the motor for politics.

Can the maturity model offer enough friction to deflate the insularity of the unchastened and to sustain a broader reexamination of relations of hierarchy? Clearly the trope of maturation performs some amount of moral and politico-cultural work both. ²² The cultural and political work is obvious: it provides an account of the paradox by which a hierarchical relationship—here, guardians and immature—comes to cultivate the ability of the vulnerable to exercise some measure of freedom. The maturity model offers a collective ideal that provides motivation for individuals to engage in ethical work, and also stipulates an ethical good (the ethos of maturity) that rises above the raucous contest of politics. As a collective ideal, it is additionally appealing for being democratic—anyone can attain it. It offers both a process and a moral end, and the opportunity to narrate the tension between these two in Honig’s language of appeals to “in the beginning.” Such narratives establish an appealingly provisional interpretive housing in which to make critique a continuous activity. The framework of maturity thus seems apt, even as Honig notes that its developmental overtones would limit any skills it offers in managing conditionality—to make these part of “growing up” is to place their acquisition beyond politics and to appeal to a philosophic naturalism. ²³ And therein lies the rub. Yet again, the skills for attaining these ends do not obviously lie within the boundaries of human community.

To add greater texture to resistance and prevent its displacement beyond politics, one might turn to politics itself as an education. As James Tully argues, political struggles unusually have the potential to modify the very ethos of participation. He argues, “[Citizens] learn to govern and be governed in the context of relatively stable irresolution where the possibility of dissent is an implicit ‘permanent provocation’ that effects the negotiations.” ²⁴ Such sites of “stable irresolution” juxtapose the unruliness of political contest with the organizing effects of immanent norms. “Learning to govern and be governed,” then, need not be simple adherence to these norms. It implies a different understanding of and relation to constraint. If agreement—the product of negotiation and circumstance—“is always non-consensual to some extent,” ²⁵ then such constraints become both ineluctable and evaluated in terms of their continued openness to dissent. Constraint becomes tolerable to the extent that it allows for continuous play rather than stabilizing into the experience of domination. And so such an education also implies the cultivation of an appreciation for contestability as a measure of freedom. Contest gains in political potency as it shapes and is shaped by two elements of political activity: the forms of political participation and the practices, or mode, of governance. Agentic political resistance, then, derives from its practitioners’ ability to distinguish between those forms that enable rather than disable, and those practices that are more or less expressive of the complexities of lived experience. Resistance culminates in, rather than contradicts, the experience of freedom insofar as it remains possible to call a norm into question and alter one’s relation to it.

The resulting ethos sidesteps the psychological tension of “agonistic respect,” to make resistance the simultaneous negotiation of structural constraints and the experience of freedom. To value resistance as an activity, persons must be able to discern those forms that enable dissent and those practices that make that dissent expressive and meaning-laden. They must learn to “see” and “say” resistance differently. Tully’s appeal to a civicisation of politics, however, presumes that insight into these changes unfolds alongside the experiences themselves. Is such an assumption warranted? If agonism is, as Brown suggested earlier, “to repair the broken thread of historical narrative,” then its practitioners must be able to narrate both the experience of normative change across past, present, and future. And they must do so in such a way that the struggle with and against constraint imbues meaning into these as practices of freedom. If these practices are to be truly open-ended, then prior to any contests their terms and significance are as-yet unsettled and unauthorized. Meaning, it would seem, follows after struggle and transformation; again, for these changes to be politically transformative, individuals need the capacity to voice and defend these changes rather than merely reproducing them behaviorally.

The preoccupation with the forms and practices of resistance, as well as the narratives that encase them, resonates deeply with psychoanalytic practice. Indeed the critical tradition on which agonistic politics draws has a long-standing affiliation with Freud and psychoanalysis both. Indeed, this tradition was forged in the crucible of the intellectual and political ferment of 1968. Herbert Marcuse bluntly defends the claim that “psychological categories . . . have become political ones” in his “political preface” to Eros and Civilization. ²⁶ Marcuse finds in psychoanalysis the critical resources for a negative dialectic capable of resisting the grip of modern rationalization and challenging key political categories and institutions. Psychoanalysis, then, both clinically evokes and critically theorizes the tendency to psychologize modern politics or to render structural categories on terms of insistently subjective experience. Habermas appeals to this double clinical and critical edge when he appeals to psychoanalysis to develop his intersubjective practical reason, so as to theorize the conditions under which psyche and society might be mediated through institutional change. ²⁷ In different ways, these appeals all find in psychoanalysis a vocabulary that frames ethical and political questions of meaning, resistance, and freedom—not to mention experiences of fantasy, loss, trauma, and play. Rather than trying to “prove” psychoanalysis right or wrong, or to circumscribe its reach from the outset, these appeals suggest alongside Richard Rorty that “psychoanalysis should be used rather transcended.” ²⁸ Psychoanalysis provides a vocabulary for post-humanist efforts to make meaning from suffering, and to understand those moral dilemmas that cannot be resolved through recourse to causes or intentions. It offers at least a provisional means to broach psychic, political, and ethical practices as well as related analytic categories.

Psychoanalytic clinical practice would seem to consolidate the advantages of the various models on offer with agonistic theorists of democracy. Not only might it offer a coherent set of practices for ethical cultivation, it also provides a much-needed account of the psychological motivation for the agonist political project. Psychoanalytic practice cultivates the capacity to tolerate experiences of rupture and discontinuity, as well as to order the insights gained into something more than ressentiment rampant. Development specifically in what one might call “narrative capacity” is crucial here. ²⁹ Such a capacity implies a particular adroitness with the lability of meaning so as to reconsider and rewrite those narratives not limited to particular experience. In the section that follows, I will revisit the psychic experience of resistance so as to disentangle it from the clinical dynamics that organize it. The turn to clinical practice clarifies misunderstandings about these dynamics, as well as the central place for formative relationships in these questions of attachment and detachment from community. The result is clarity on those elements necessary to any self-cultivation more broadly speaking.

The Undoing of Nacherziehung

Although psychoanalysis is often thought of as a recollection of childhood, Freud very deliberately structures the analytic encounter so as to stage a confrontation with parentage broadly speaking. The relationship binding analyst and patient becomes a structural and narrative frame through which to conjure up previous relations to parents, educators, spiritual directors, and so forth. More than a moment of therapeutic self-indulgence, the psychoanalytic encounter renders these personages material and manifest. The clinical writings thus draw attention to the nexus of individual psychology and collective symbolism rather than speaking directly to cultural taboos (e.g., the incest taboo) or intrapsychic processes (such as projection, narcissism, etc.). And so the psychoanalytic present is not exactly the present of daily life—it offers a very unusual kind of “moral space” ³⁰ haunted by spectral others and characterized by disjointed temporalities, one in which these affects and attachments come to be focalized on a single personal relationship. This personal relationship frames political and cultural contest on particular terms; psychoanalytic practices offer a practical means to work through this sense of dislocation, its own uneasy parentage, and so to feel at home in it. Resonating with Honig’s appeals to interpretive “home,” Freud would seem to offer a site in which to negotiate renovations to an interpretive housing at once personal and collective. ³¹

As a Nacherziehung, psychoanalysis holds out the possibility of not just making individuals more mindful of cultural codes but also of introjecting these individuals into the authorial process of rewriting them. Such work is at once clinical and critical. It is clinical insofar as it has a therapeutic aim of ethical self-cultivation that is more than one of cultural integration or personal mindfulness. It is critical insofar as it leverages the “therapeutic alliance” into a collaborative, historical reflection on one’s present; to do so, it engages in the political work of negotiation and revision of the cultural architectonic that uses the past to legitimate the present. What enables psychoanalysis to achieve this double effect is the move, first, to rest the analytic relationship on a tension between resistance and transference; and second, to make it fundamentally disruptive of any social roles, including those of “doctor” and “patient,” that might organize it.

Psychoanalysis and Politics

Psychoanalytic practices clarify the conditions under which resistance—resistance to one’s childhood past, to authoritative others, to one’s unacknowledged self—might be made ethically generative. Risk relies on a dislocation in authoritative relationship—that the authority “confronted” is assimilated to the figure of the analyst but is generally symbolic of another. Psychoanalysis thus permits an experience of contest that is not overdetermined by hierarchy, one that is collaborative across asymmetries, and one that makes trust a product rather than a precondition of the relationship. In response to debates about agonism, psychoanalysis offers an instance in which the experience of resistance can be separated from the valorization of contestability, so as to distinguish the vulnerabilities of hierarchy from the vibrancy of its contestation. The resulting education begins to disentangle the experience of trauma from collaboration around its undoing. The model of “education” resists the naturalism and developmental teleology that inheres in the language of “maturity.” The labor-intensity of this model contravenes efforts to evaluate other kinds of education in terms of efficiency while holding onto their democratic promise.

Raising these questions in terms of clinical practice also suggests that thus far political theorists have mistakenly compressed the space between therapeutic action and narrative, between ethical cultivation and political engagement. Certainly experience generates insight, and certainly theorists should encourage political interventions. But to encourage more radical change, agonists should seek out those interventions susceptible to dislodging, rather than reproducing, existing practices. Especially for those experiences that undo, the process can be profoundly disarticulating as persons confront realizations that are irrational, ugly, or alien. Psychoanalysis suggests the need to stay with these unpleasant wishes and work through them rather than rushing to frame these as coherent claims or to narrate any nascent change. ⁶⁰ Psychoanalysis teaches to resist asserting a unity of personal identity, claim, or community so as to learn from the pressures of disintegration.

That its ethical cultivation rests on such unusual dynamics also suggests that psychoanalytic resistance cannot simply be “scaled up” for politics, but that it needs a different kind of adaptation. Freud moves us further along in this adaptation. He helps us to recognize that the tension between ethical cultivation and political engagement need not be the tired division of private and public. To the contrary: psychoanalysis enables persons to articulate how cultural intermediaries—such as analysts, parents, educators, spiritual directors—come to have formative effect and how this formation can be reworked, undone, superseded. While they do not stipulate collective ends as such, interactions with these intermediaries provide the interpretive housing that husbands those nascent transformations and narratives that are the work of critique. The challenge remaining is to reflect on the political limits of these interactions.

Lingering fears regarding the adaptation of psychoanalysis for politics have been articulated in two ways: first, as the concern that psychoanalysis inspires an introspection oriented toward sublimating aggression, particularizing structural inequalities, and so defanging political resistances; and second, that psychoanalysis is ill suited for mass politics—it is either a practice available only for the elite, or a practice that dangerously encourages leaders to engage in mass manipulation under the guise of a therapeutic politics. By casting clinical practice as a combative collaboration, I sidestep both critiques by insisting on psychoanalytic practice as an irreducibly relational activity that unfolds in quasi-social space. If the first critique worries that politics has been removed to interiorized conflict, the second simply externalizes that conflict and its therapeutic treatment onto interactions between citizens and leaders. By contrast, my analysis seeks to hold onto the intermediate space of clinical practice as framed by these contradictions between the internal and external, the personal and the collective. Any aspect of the psychoanalytic encounter—raw affect, rationalized defenses, psychic enactments—returns over and again to the relational form. This form binds patient to analyst as well as patient to authoritative others, and it frames both parties’ entanglement with symbolic communities of family, polis, neighborhood, and workplace. Resistance within these relations becomes the interpretive grist for an engagement with the conditions of symbolic meaning. Where previous thinkers made resistance either internal or external, either personal or social, my emphasis on relationality makes it an element of any responsiveness and locates it firmly in a quasi-social space. ⁶¹

The work of ethical cultivation, however, cannot be divorced from the intensity of its relationality. Insofar as Nietzsche haunts many agonistic accounts, one might well read Freud’s Nacherziehung in contradistinction to Nietzschean exemplarity and as contributing to models of democratic friendship. I lack the space to explore the complexities of this comparison here. The striking difference between Nietzsche and Freud, however, lies in Freud’s ability to institutionalize a contestatory relationship into a set of practices capable of being revised and extended over time. For all that this institutionalization, in its early years, led to an authoritarian “psychoanalytic movement” that broached little dissent from Freud’s leadership, it also provided a context to revisit these practices and make them more self-reflexive. ⁶² Tensions between different schools of psychoanalysis, and between psychotherapy and psychiatry, remain high. Even so, its professional conferences, journals, and training analyses are dominated by concerns for the impossibility of stable knowledge, the dangers of interpretive mastery, and the patient’s vulnerability. Revisiting these questions, however, has led to refinement in clinical dynamics (rather than analytic virtues or self-chastening), to focalize countervailing resistances. Where the patient resists a person who is an imperfect effigy of authorities past, the analyst must resist asserting her own expertise in such a way as to impose her words on the patient or truncate his coming-to-insight. The institutionalization of this model allows the surrounding culture to come to tolerate its insights over time, and for the model itself to endure and evolve. It also more clearly engages the relationship between self-formation and cultural structures.

The political costs of this institutionalization—the imbrication of confessional and legal technologies into a therapeutic state—are sobering and familiar. They highlight the frictive contact between self-practices and the juridical apparatus of the state and the increasing allocation of moral subjectivity by the state. Existing at this intersection, self-formation carries a political urgency that suggests that this terrain should neither be ceded to the neoliberal state nor made the responsibility of already-individuated persons. The neoliberal response to the resistances of psychoanalysis is to turn to legal regulation—from equal concern to protect the patient and to assert state prerogative. Commenting on such regulatory responses in his day, Freud ventriloquizes a third-party skeptic wishing for the opportunity to sit in on an analytic exchange as a means to provide oversight. Freud claims that such an audience is impossible to accommodate, since such “an unauthorized listener who hit upon a chance one of them would as a rule form no useful impression; he would be in danger of not understanding what was passing between the analyst and the patient, or he would be bored.” ⁶³

The wish for an audience signals a wish for a stabilization of claim and evidence so as to deem these “authoritative.” The fantasy of an audience either of legal oversight or of third-party witness marks the extent to which Western society has come to fetishize assertion as a guarantee of the truthfulness of a claim and the trustworthiness of its speaker. ⁶⁴ In a legal setting, assertion and corroboration are the two kinds of speech privileged; the adversarial setting of the court is designed to test competing claims about events in the past and their consequences. Yet privileging assertion is possible only in certain rule-bound contexts with clear rules of discovery, evidence, and argumentative proceeding. We trust this setting to get, if not to “the truth of the matter,” then at least to a truth that can be deemed to be legally consequential and binding. Similarly, third-party oversight allows us to corroborate claims and, more powerfully, to serve as a witness to unjust suffering.

Psychoanalysis provides a unique scene of encounter that refuses to indulge those two fantasies so as to encourage a different kind of truth-telling and trusting relationship, and to teach the practice of a different sort of ethical authority. With the juxtaposition of its indirection in speech against its highly structured format, psychoanalysis creates a space of structured uncertainty. Instead of relying on assertion and responsibility for the intention behind the claim or the consequences that follow, the combative collaboration of analysis permits a second-order reflection on the truthfulness of claims and their connection to other values—responsiveness, confidence, steadiness—that cannot be didactically taught or defended in any meaningful way. Instead, analysis provides a setting that enables participants to reflect on ethical environment—contoured by questions of timing, discretion, and motivation—rather than focusing narrowly on discrete acts of decision. Ethical authority comes not from the regulation of responsibility but from the framing of a moral ecology; the authorship of such a context must be shared between analyst and patient in order for the patient to inhabit it fully. More than a cognitive appreciation for contingency, clinical practice creates an environment that cultivates those second-order ethical practices (e.g., courage, solidarity, generosity) that are expressed, rather than debated, in times of change.

Working back toward politics, my analysis of psychoanalytic practice offers two implications: first, that we redirect attention to the replication of the relational form across politics, and second, it offers criteria for those new “sacral spaces” that might vivify these relations. In response to the first, my emphasis on its relational dynamics calls attention to the qualities that inflect different asymmetrical relationships. The constant return to the different play and experience of asymmetry within these relational forms teaches something about the range of what Foucault calls the “forms of subjection” that comprise our experience of politics and culture. Thinking on relational terms suggests that we constantly find ourselves on the one hand “impressed upon by others” even as we appeal to the sensation of being “beside ourselves” (from grief, joyful ecstasy, rage, shock) to express some sense of dislocation that is not always classic alienation. ⁶⁵ The analytic encounter becomes an opportunity to explore the possibilities—for growth, speech, understanding, action—opened up or foreclosed by each relationship and to think of individuals as variously stretched or ethically pulled beyond themselves. Insofar as contestatory politics broadly seeks “to be governed not so much and not in that way,” individuals must be able to navigate a world of complex interdependencies. For these interactions to be experienced, nonetheless, as freedom requires the ability to move within them. It requires a preparation and training; it also necessitates an ethical articulacy equal to the task. As agonists appeal to practices rather than rules, they need a clearer sense of the contexts that define and delimit those practices that bear on governance. Less an argument in favor of the “self-diminution and moral expansion” urged by White and Connolly, I find in psychoanalytic practice an education for managing asymmetries that bear on everyday life. Its dynamics better direct psychic resistance toward the self-transformation central to agonistic politics. This education is premised not just on the success of these relations but on their breakdown; it culls from the experiences of fantasy, loss, betrayal, and trauma an ethics sensitive to those inarticulacies that haunt ostensibly shared political experience.

Second, my account of analytic practices indexes a need to cultivate “sacral spaces” that might sustain these interactions beyond explicit clinical settings. While not directly a part of politics, such spaces bear on those interactions that are broadly symbolic, refracted on particularist terms, and contribute to the elusive experience of veracity. France, more than the United States, has experimented in bringing psychoanalytic practice to bear on university education and mass politics through the post-1968 curriculum at the University of Vincennes. The brilliant failures of these experiments reinforce the claim that any Nacherziehung cannot be translated into anything programmatic. ⁶⁶ They underscore one of the lasting legacies of May 1968—namely, the recognition that we have come to psychologize structural moral, political, and economic inequalities. At the same time, these failures also suggest that any response must avoid a similar collapse of the psychological and the structural, or of the clinical and the critical. If psychoanalysis is a potential in all kinds of other educational practices, then my analysis suggests a few qualities that new “sacral spaces” must have: they must be organized around iterated, personal interactions; they exist “in-between” personal and collective practices; their experiences are not immediately political ones; their education need neither to be confined to the psychoanalytic couch nor institutionalized in the university. These qualities also suggest something missing from the agonistic accounts cited earlier: that greater attention to the relational quality of interactions makes interpretation into a site for collaboration rather than a resistance to be overcome. Psychoanalysis provides a language to hold onto the experience of dislocation, while suggesting the relational dynamics that mobilize this experience into articulate, vibrant contestations of order.