Revolutionary Neurotics and the Cunning of Conservatism

In its attention to internal conflict and disavowed ambivalences, psychoanalytic theory often makes trouble for the instigators of social change. This theory unveils a conservative drift lodged within even the most maverick impulse, highlighting the ambivalence of political conviction and subsequent difficulty of bringing about social change. The revolutionary's identity is indeed overdetermined in nature, and certain tenets of psychoanalytic thought help explain the conservative identifications that sometimes lie hidden behind subversive action. At times, then, a society's progressive forces ironically gravitate toward those institutionalized forms of power and authority they publicly oppose, replaying what they seek to dismantle and unwittingly repackaging what they hope to destroy. In this essay, I analyze why even the most revolutionary elements of a culture can ultimately display mimetic, conservative tendencies. I do this by focusing on those trends which identify strongly with the very framework they oppose and thus reproduce that framework in sometimes deliberate, sometimes subconscious ways. My specific interest lies with the deep ambivalences and neurotic orientation of the colonial setting as described by Frantz Fanon.

Psychoanalytic theory offers at least two reasons why social change is often stymied by its own instigators, whose ambivalent, doubled sense of self confounds their good intentions. One reason pertains to the melancholia to which we are all susceptible, a sadness that confirms our resistance to change and consequent love of the status quo. Authors such as Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler build on Freud's basic theory to argue that melancholia is central in allowing subjectivity to emerge at all; integral to gender formation, it exists as an experience at the very bedrock of our social identities. Despite our familiarity with this tenebrous state, however, we never grow accustomed to its distressing influence. For given its abilit