François Bafoil - The Politics of Destruction: Three Contemporary Configurations of Hallucination: USSR, Polish PiS Party, Islamic State

This chapter examines three configurations of hallucination through their similarities and differences. Similarities relate to the psychoanalytical approachwith the notion of the unconscious at its coreof repetition and destruction, through which I examine the processes of construction of a hallucinated surreality in each case. Repetition is felt as a vital constraint and as such is akin to a compulsion founded on inexhaustible anxiety (because constantly fueled). This anxiety is triggered by the constant threat of disappearance and death by a malevolent force, of enemies obsessed with annihilation. Differences relate to History perceived in light of the double aspect of the Western reason, when it defines it first as the negative side of that of which reason would be the positive, in the fullness of discourse, science and art; and as the Other of Reasonreason being understood as common sense from which this Other would be substantively different.

By focusing on certain personality types in totalitarian thinkingthose from the Bolshevik regime and the Islamic Stateand in a derivative of it, the authoritarian thinking identified with the Polish ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS)this essay seeks to better understand that which corresponds to the notion of hallucination in relation to politics or even, to borrow the term Freud used in reference to dreams, wish fulfillment. If perception refers to an existing external object and is its mnemonic trace, hallucination differs from this in that it pertains to the mnemonic trace of a lacking object to which it gives form and content by recomposing them. It distinguishes itself all the more in that it is attached to an indefectible belief in its reality by those who are experiencing the hallucination, and who use all the means at their disposal to impose it on others as an inescapable reality . The dimension of this belief, and still more a profound conviction, leads to obsession and fixation. It forces the act of repetition and reinforces this deep conviction that the hallucination is a clear and unavoidable reality . What separates a psychiatric approach to hallucination from a political approach, which I explore here, is the emphasis on violence against those in political power, intended to impose this deep conviction on others and to prohibit any change that could possibly lead to another lived reality .

It is this form and content that need to be analyzed, as do the political means carried out to impose it on citizens in place of reality , either collective or individual. To do so, I will try to understand the desire that animates political thought and action when this desire pertains to an obsession with purity and authorizes certain individuals to unleash a terrifying wave of violence. What is particularly striking, of course, is this violence seen as a sign of ancestral barbarity. But it is equally the chasm the violence implies, that of the unbearable lack felt by the perpetrators of this violence, a lack in which they damage themselves as if to better pull themselves out of the chasm. With this extreme violence, they suggest that the lacking object at the root of their anxiety which can be a social class they consider rotten, an untenable distortion of religion, or even an unacceptable perversion of historymust be eliminated in the most radical way possible and replaced by an idealized reality : a single and unique social class; the originary religion; sacred history.