The Master Amid Rumors of His Demise: Politics in a Time of “Satisfaction”

By all appearances, symbolic authority has undergone a dramatic decline today. Not only do people no longer seem connected by a communal bond (underwritten by symbolic authority), but, look as we might, it is difficult to discern any clearly functioning representatives of patriarchal Law. The most likely candidate—the person often referred to as the “most powerful man in the world”—has come under attack precisely because of his failure to fit the bill. Rather than embodying a position of symbolic authority, President Clinton seems more, as Jonathan Lear has argued recently, a kind of pre-symbolic authority, a version of the father of the primal horde, not prohibiting jouissance but monopolizing it for himself.

Few people dispute that symbolic authority is in decline, though what you think of it depends in large part upon your politics. If you're on the Right, perhaps you lament the absence of fathers, good role models, heroes, and strong leaders. If you're on the Left, perhaps you celebrate what Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe call the “proliferation of struggles” and “new forms of social conflict” (1), which both indicate and further symbolic authority's decline. It is my contention, however, that this decline is only illusory, that while symbolic authority seems to have undergone a decline in its influence, its power over contemporary subjects has in fact multiplied. This power is evident in the near disappearance of radical political activity today. The absence of symbolic authority and the corresponding prohibition of jouissance should—or so it seems—open up possibilities for jouissance and possibilities for all kinds of radical political activity. In short, we should expect to see all sorts of challenges to the hegemony of late capitalism. That we don't see these challenges—or, that we don't see any that have been widely embraced—suggests that symbolic authority, the agency of prohibition, has not disappeared but has gone underground. And underground—because i