From neurotic citizen to hysteric security expert
A Lacanian reading of the perpetual demand for US cyber defence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5682272 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jeppe T Jacobsen (0000-0002-4931-1008, Royal Danish Defence College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 46-58 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Studies on Security (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2162-4887 • E-ISSN: 2162-4909 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/21624887.2020.1735830 |
| OpenAlex | W3010139296 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 29 |
Within the emerging body of critical security research on expertise, most contributions have focused on reconstructing the risk governance regime that the expert professionals embody, including the anxious, neurotic subject that expert security practices reproduce. Through French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan’s Hysteric Discourse, the article advances the study of the neurotic subject to include the security policy expert. By introducing and applying a ‘hysteric reading strategy’ to the processes through which US cyber defence experts identify as policy experts, the article suggests that the constantly changing demands for policy change produced by these experts suggest a desire not simply for new policies that promise cyber defence but for desire itself. From this, the article argues that these experts occupy a social position in which desire is perpetually sliding from one object to the next, always placing cyber defence out of reach, and hence, reproducing ‘cyber’ as an insecurity in the present. The article sees this dynamic play out both in the evolving cache of policy recommendations on cyber deterrence produced by the cyber policy experts, and in the revolving doors between government and this expert community
Biopower · Computer security · Corporate governance · Cyberwarfare · Economics · Management · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · Artificial Intelligence
The Lacanian Subject
The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses
Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise
From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout
Risk and the War on Terror
Politics of Catastrophe
Security Expertise
Terror, Insecurity and Liberty
The Politics of Insecurity
Beyond the gap
Narrative, desire, ontological security, transgression
Surveillance Strategies and Populations at Risk
The U.S. Military's Manpower Crisis
Weapons, desire and the making of war
Digital Disaster, Cyber Security, and the Copenhagen School
Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics
Security and Immigration
Beyond Risk
Forgetting Isis
The neoliberal/neurotic citizen and security as discourse
State, nation, society
Agency, reflexivity and risk
The neurotic citizen
Making Things Known
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |