Psychoanalysis, feminism, and anarchism. A needed disruption to the Master’s Discourse by Alicia Valdés
The author has kindly agreed to share this paper she presented at our online event on Freudo-Anarchism on 25th June 2023 . We welcome further contributions from our anarchist comrades.
Alicia Valdés is a postdoctoral researcher at Carlos III University of Madrid. She is the author of Toward a Feminist Lacanian Left: Psychoanalytic Theory and Intersectional Politics.
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While I believe the conversation on anarchism and psychoanalysis is much needed, we face several obstacles when discussing both topics. On the one hand, neither of these two positions occupies a central space in academia or even activism. On the other hand, when there are spaces in which we can engage in conversations on anarchism or psychoanalysis, I, as a feminist anarchist, still find it difficult to discover places in which to speak from an intersectional, transdisciplinary, feminist and heterodox position about both anarchism and psychoanalysis. Moreover, I think this is due to the reproduction of a Master's Discourse within both fields by people in privileged positions.
As the famous anarchist historian Tomás Ibáñez describes in his book Anarquismo es movimiento, "I have fought for some time against the guardians of the temple, that is, against those who want to preserve anarchism in the exact form they had inherited it, at the risk of suffocating it and preventing it from evolving". [1] Ibañez's thought on the guardians of the temple of anarchism is easily extrapolated to psychoanalysis.
My talk aims to introduce some notes on how I think of psychoanalysis and anarchism from an intersectional and feminist point of view. The intersection between anarchism, feminism, and psychoanalysis is inevitable. The revolutionary potential of the unconscious and the feminist questioning of the cartesian subject establish a paradigm for an inner liberation of the issue much needed for anarchism. However, today I would like to introduce a feminist and anarchist reading on the Master's Discourse and the construction of Reality or Political Reality.
Many Lacanian feminists who have developed the articulation between Lacanian theory and feminism have done so around the notion of the Lacanian Symbolic. Thus, their analysis determines that the Symbolic is patriarchal. However, I would like to move from the idea of the Symbolic to that of Reality.
As I have argued elsewhere, I believe that Reality results from discursive operations. Reality is built to imitate the subject's three orders of experience. That is to say; political rhetoric instruments aim at creating a fantasy whose structure includes a Symbolic, an Imaginary, and a Real. The final goal of this fantasy is to limit the subject's experience to a politically imposed Reality. Thus, the political struggle over hegemony aims at structuring such levels. In this sense, Reality is permanently biased by the hegemonical ideology and position of power. We could then say that our current Reality is androcentric. [2] Describing Reality as androcentric and not just patriarchal allows for a broader and more complex analysis of power structures and how we are oppressed and privileged.
The main discursive operation through which Reality is constructed is the Master's Discourse. In Lacan's description of the Master's Discourse, a Master-Signifier (MS) S1 intervenes in a battery of signifiers S2. [3] Such an intervention results in the production of knowledge and meaning and the subject's emergence. From a feminist perspective, I argue that the MS that intervenes is man or masculine, which results in the creation of the androcentric Reality. It is at this point that a question arises. Is there a possibility of dismantling the androcentric Reality? Can it be done through the creation of a feminine Reality? Can this feminine subversion make power disappear?
The issues regarding which MS will intervene is the ultimate example of the struggle for hegemony. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau define hegemony as the imposition of particularity as universal. From my point of view, this assumption of a particularity as a totality necessarily implies the exclusion of certain forms of life. The imposition of S1 will always make the opposite S1 emerge (¬S1). Thus, the master's Discourse will always indicate the emergence of a slave, which will be excluded from Reality.
In her article "Women: political subjects in the Lacanian Left", María Liliana Ottaviano rightly points out that a feminism that is symptomatic of politics is a "[f]eminism that does not claim to be a universal but is willing to accommodate all diversity and dissent in terms of sex, gender and decisions". [4] Thus, to be a symptom of the political, to make conflict visible, feminism should not engage in the battle for hegemony but engage in a different struggle. It is at this point that anarchism engages with intersectional feminism and psychoanalysis.
From an intersectional and anarchist point of view, the struggle for hegemony is not the central political battle in which we must engage. The need to reject the achievement of power through the imposition of S1 is clear. The master's Discourse allows the barred subject to emerge, thus conditioning and limiting the emergence of other subjects. Feminisms that exclude trans women and sex workers are examples of how the emergence of the feminist and feminine subject through the hegemonic imposition of a true woman creates hierarchies that reinforce androcentrism, which intersectional feminism aims at dismantling. Thus, from a feminist and anarchist position, how shall we approach Reality if it is not through hegemony?
I do not believe I have the response to such a question. However, I think two notions can help us start paving the path. These are the notions of sexual position and the not-all.
On the one hand, the notion of the sexual position is an interesting introduction to intersectional feminism as it does not centralize gender but every dimension of oppression and privilege. Thus, the sexual position one occupies depends on the subject's relation to Reality. Suppose European Political Reality involves specific systems of oppression such as racism, classism, cisgenderism, sexism, ageism, and ableism. In that case, the sexual position of the subjects, their femininity or masculinity, derives from their position vis-à-vis this intricate network of oppressive structures. Thus, an urban upper-class cis-hetero white woman possesses a masculine sexual position when she physically or verbally assaults or denies a livable life to a black and gay refugee who occupies the female sexual position within the European Symbolic. In this sense, gender or assigned sex does not define vulnerability or life as livable, but the sexual position someone possesses concerning a symbolic order. The sexual position depends on how subjects' identities fit or adjust to the Symbolic in different contexts.
On the other hand, introducing the sexual position to intersectional feminism is an opportunity to think of dismantling Reality from a different perspective than the one offered by hegemony. This new approach is that of the not-all.
Introducing the notion of the not-all as a central aspect of left-wing politics would allow us to leave behind universalizing and totalizing claims that have put state power ahead of municipal governance, and institutional power ahead of the potential of social movements. Furthermore, explaining that mobilization should always be directed towards achieving hegemony and state power and thinking that total change resides in macro-politics generates demobilization. Anarchist municipalism and community currencies exemplify how not-all can be applied to real-life politics.
Thus, a feminist and psychoanalytical approach to anarchism can help us create what Rossi Braidotti coined as affirmative politics, which aims at the counter-production of an alternative present and the metamorphosis of subjectivity. [5]
1. Tomás Ibáñez, Anarquismo es movimiento: anarquismo, neoanarquismo y postanarquismo (Virus, 2014), 11.
2. Alicia Valdés, Toward a Feminist Lacanian Left. Psychoanalytical Theory and Intersectional Politics, The Lines of the Symbolic Series in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2022).
3. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trad. Russell Grigg, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII (Norton and Company, 2007).
4. Maria Liliana Ottaviano, «Mujeres: sujetas políticas en la izquierda lacaniana», #lacanemancipa, 2019, https://lacaneman.hypotheses.org/233.
5. Rosi Braidotti, Por una política afirmativa: itinerarios éticos, trad. Carlos Vitale, Primera edición (Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, 2018).
