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How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the signifier, or metaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor.
The alleged irresponsibility of the philosopher, Slavoj Žižek's endorsement of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential election has been largely panned, but there does seem to be some truth to Žižek's claim that Trump's election would force each of us to confront our complicity in the current state of affairs. As much as we try to throw ourselves into the superiority-jouissance of reading and watching the news and the trolling and being trolled of social media, we cannot help but be tossed back into I have done nothing, to the horror of what now? Žižek (2017) noted how the Left and Right alike are engaged in politics of Fear, which leads to efforts to destroy the external object, and that what is needed is a shift to politics of Angst, that we might be compelled to transform ourselves.
For psychologists and psychoanalysts confronting this Angst, the appearance of the Karnac collection The Political Self, edited by Rod Tweedy and released at the beginning of 2017, is a welcome arrival. As psychoanalysts, what little we do know is that Žižek is quite right in this regard; if we are to change, if the world is to change, Angst rather than fear can show us the way. Even the form of this book is apropos. One wishes for the heterogeneity of a collection: the dissent that forces us into thought, and towards, one can only pray, the act.
Such heterogeneity is, of course, circumscribed by any collection's editor, but Tweedy, himself, seems to cut a rather idiosyncratic figure: attracted, on the one hand to inimitable Romantic figures, the like