This book uses a critique of Slavoj Zizekās work in order to outline a theory of psychoanalytic rhetoric. I turn to Zizek because not only is he one of the most popular intellectuals in the world, but his discourse is shaped by a set of unconscious rhetorical processes that also determine much of contemporary of politics, culture, and subjectivity.1 Just as Aristotle argued that the three main forms of persuasion are logos (reason), pathos (emotion), and ethos (authority), I posit that each one of these aspects of communication is related to a fundamental psychoanalytic concept.2 Moreover, I turn to Aristotleās work on theater to posit a fourth form of rhetoric, catharsis, which is the purging of feelings of fear and pity.3
Freud called his initial psychoanalytic method, catharsis, and he argued that the fundamental drive of all human beings is the pleasure principle as the desire to avoid all tension and excessive stimulation.4 As a form of unconscious rhetoric, catharsis represents a desire to attain pleasure by escaping feelings of guilt and shame. Thus, according to the dictates of the pleasure principle, language can be utilized as a medium for reducing the need for mental energy, and popular culture is fundamentally shaped by the desire to escape from anxiety caused by conflict. Just as people turn to their iPhones or opiates in order to stop thinking about the reality of their lives, catharsis through entertainment allows people the possibility to deny feelings of anxiety, guilt, and shame as they receive instant access to pleasure.
In Zizekās work, we will see how his use of jokes, popular culture, and obscenities helps him to deliver pleasure to his audience, and as Freud argued in relation to jokes, the speaker bribes the audience with enjoyment so that he or she will not be held accountable for what is being said.5 Jokes, then, provide a safe social space where people are able to express their violent and sexual impulses in a sublimated fashion without fear of retribution. In the context of contemporary culture, we find that entertainment reduces the tension caused by the central conflict between nature and culture. Since society is structured around the regulation of sex and violence, humans have to sacrifice part of their own inner nature to be members of a culture, but as Freud insisted, these natural urges can never be fully effaced, and so they have to be displaced through the use of symbolic substitutions.6
It is my contention that we need this theory of catharsis to explain how someone like Donald Trump became president of the United States. From this perspective, we cannot understand his popularity simply by seeing how he caters to certain groups (Christian fundamentalists, nationalists, libertarians, wealthy business people, and the white working class); moreover, the Rightās opposition to the Left, to liberals, and the Democrats only represents one aspect of contemporary political polarization.7 What we get from the theory of catharsis is the extra thing that fuels the Rightās hegemonic coalition.
In his first important book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek calls this special connecting force, enjoyment, but I would like to use Freudās original theory of the pleasure principle to replace enjoyment with catharsis.8 While enjoyment is associated with positive feelings, pleasure has to do with the escape from guilt, shame, and ultimately reality.
We shall see that what Trump embodies is the contemporary blending of capitalism, art, and politics, which were once thought to be separate and opposed areas of culture and everyday life.9 It is therefore impossible to tell if Trump is a politician or a media star or a businessman because he is all of these things at once, and since entertainment is driven by the delivery of catharsis to its audience, a society where entertainment has spread to most aspects of life is a society shaped by the pleasure principle.
As I show in Chap. 2, it is vital to understand how catharsis works because so much of our culture, politics, and subjectivity is shaped by this unconscious use of rhetoric. As politics becomes a form of entertainment, and the news becomes another mode of art, we see that catharsis enters different aspects of our lives. Moreover, whether we look at the opiate epidemic, the rise of Trump, and or the hypnotic effect of iPhones, we find the same desire of people to escape from reality by accessing an easy and immediate form of pleasure.10 In examining Zizekās rhetoric, I will demonstrate the role played by catharsis in contemporary culture.
After I elaborate the psychoanalytic rhetorical theory of catharsis, I turn to the use of pathos in contemporary politics, culture, and subjectivity. Drawing from Freudās conception of hysteri...