Unquestionable Freedom in a Psychotic West
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12885374 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Juliet Rogers (0000-0003-0304-5266, The University of Melbourne, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 186-207 |
| Publication date | 2005-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Law Culture and the Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1743-8721 • E-ISSN: 1743-9752 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1191/1743872105lw014oa |
| OpenAlex | W2114946093 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Freedom is not something to be thought about since September 11 and since freedom can be both given to the Iraqis as a gift from the ‘coalition of the willing,’ and purchased in the form of ‘freedom jeans,’ ‘freedom cars,’ and ‘freedom perfume.’ Freedom, in its unthinkable presence as gift, product and foundational premise of Western democracy, has assumed a psychotic structure in the psyche of the Western subject. The status of freedom as a product to be chosenand purchased, and as a gift given to the Iraqis via military intervention, offers an ontological status to the psychotic subject of the West as a being in a state of being unquestionably, unthinkingly free. The questionable ontological status of the Western subject–who I refer to in this paper as West–as a free subject, is collapsed into a signifier without paternity; a signifier whichdisables questions about whetherone is or isn'tfree in the free West. This article discusses the signification of freedom represented in political and popular culture discourse as product and gift in the West and, using Maurice Sendak's protagonist, Max, in Where the Wild Things Are, Renata Salecl's discussion of forced choice for the subject of and in democracy and Jacques Derrida's discussion of the ‘madness’ of ‘the gift,’ considers the situation of West before the originary violence of democracy. Lacanian psychoanalysis is utilised specifically to extrapolate West's position and to diagnose his condition as psychotic. Psychoanalysis as socio-analysis–that is, the analysis of the social, as if there is only one West–is explored for its representation of a monolithic subjectivity as the subjectivity. Socio-psychoanalysis and the contemporary extrapolations of democracy in the West are discussed for their similarity in representing a particular and limited type of ‘speaking back’ of the monolithic subject, and thus, their active participation in the subjugation of resistance; in their subjugation of the question of what this freedom is that the West supposedly has to give
Aesthetics · Democracy · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Premise · Psyche · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subject (documents · Computer Science · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.12 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2009 - 2013 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |