The Politics of Pseudo-Aggression

I’ve been revisiting the first-generation Freudian theorists lately. Perhaps it is their proximity to the source of psychoanalysis that gives their concepts a potency and resonance that we often don’t find in subsequent psychoanalytic thought. But this potency can miss the mark and result in retrograde and reductive accounts of subjectivity as much as it can reveal and illuminate insights. We have to read the early Freudians carefully. In a recent essay, I developed the theory of the daydream based on the ideas of Hanns Sachs, to examine debates around AI and creative labor. Like Hanns Sachs, the thought of Edmund Bergler, an early Freudian theorist most well-known for his theory of “unconscious masochism,” is extraordinarily incisive. Bergler’s thought must be read with an immanent critique, however, given that some of his conclusions and applications of his concepts, particularly around homosexuality, veered towards reductive pathologizing.

Psychoanalytic concepts are often applied towards reactionary ends; we see this with Christopher Lasch’s reading of the concept of the ego ideal in Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. The same goes for Lacan – there is a liberal-reactionary way to read Lacan just as there is an egalitarian method of reading Lacan. A major focus of my work on Nietzsche has been set on attempting a parasitical reading of his work in ways that take seriously the reactionary core in his thought.

With these provisos stated, I want to talk about Bergler’s book on the superego and how his account of “pseudo-aggression” sheds light on questions of ideology and class politics.1 In Bergler’s account of pseudo-aggression, he argues that there is a pre-Oedipal reservoir of libidinal guilt that constitutes a fundamental problem for the formation of the ego. The neurotic refuses to confront this guilt, and this refusal becomes the defining feature of neurosis. Neurosis is thus about the need to invent “pseudo-aggressive” defenses against confronting this reality of inner masochism.

Bergler’s theory of pseudo-aggression is useful because he also abstracts this tendency and applies it to the social field and to an analysis of the biography of artists. Pseudo aggression is an aggression that is responding to a fundamentally fictional object because it functions as a defense against addressing deeper sites of antagonism. This process is what we will call displacement. Pseudo-aggression offers a valuable supplement to the standard theory of ideology that we find in Marxist analysis known as fetishistic disavowal, encapsulated in the formula: “I know very well, but nevertheless . . .” The concept of pseudo-aggression is different than fetishist disavowal in that fetishist disavowal is about denial and refusal, pseudo aggression is about aiming at an invented and nominal object where aggression is concentrated. This is why displacement is the operative move with pseudo aggression as I read it, and this is why it helps illuminate not only how ideology involves a misrecognition and the adoption of a false sense of reality, it offers an explanation as to why social antagonisms are displaced in political discourse. In this way, the concept of pseudo-aggression adds to the Marxist theory of ideology a more precise account of contradiction and how to treat contradictions; it explains how certain antagonisms are transformed into substitute conflicts while more primary contradictions are ignored or rendered invisible.

In the Marxist account of ideology there is a more rudimentary tendency of thinking that argues ideology is a matter of false consciousness. We are all familiar with this theory of ideology; it presumes that what is ideological is what is false and that politics ought to be about approaching a truer, more rational—nay, more real—form of truth. This approach to viewing ideology as a matter of false consciousness fails to identify the logic behind why the false content is persistently adhered to in political discourse. The psychoanalytic method offers an answer to this question by answering both the why and the how of ideology. In other words, what Bergler’s theory of pseudo aggression and the superego offers is an answer to the question as to why we invest in false accounts of social conflict and antagonism and why we do so persistently and in aggressive ways. We often call this form of artificial politics some sort of symptom of the “culture war.” There have been many ways of defining the culture war but for the purpose of this context, we can define it as the general tendency for political antagonisms to become incoherent sites of irresolvable conflict, sites that are substitute sites for more primary contradictions. Bourgeois politics grows decadent as an ideological project when its intellectuals and functionaries take it upon themselves to manage and perpetuate the myth that these false accounts of political conflict are indeed primary.

A good example of this sort of decadent pseudo aggression on the liberal left is the way that the glue of all social conflict is reduced to a hyper racialist account of social oppression. This sort of advocacy possesses a noble impulse, namely, it aims to correct the condition of black immiseration and racist social relations. But once the ruling class begins to incorporate this perspective, they impose an ideology onto it that forecloses any emancipatory grasp of the underlying dynamics involved in the problem to begin with. What is refused in bourgeois ideology is the way that capitalist exploitation functions to perpetuate conditions of immiseration. Moreover, it is aggressive because it must prevent the only means to adequately address the problem, which is collective class politics that extends across the racial-and-economic-oppression facing black people and unties with a far wider cross section of the working class.

Bergler’s theory of pseudo-aggression helps make legible the element in bourgeois ideology that is refused by extending this refusal of the masochistic core of the subject to the system of capitalism as such. This is how we can read Bergler in a materialist way, by understanding that the core masochistic element that animates our subjectivity is both a subjective condition and it is conditioned by the materialist relations that bind us to the system of capitalist exploitation. This is the necessary Marxist addition to Bergler’s thesis. For the system to run, bourgeois ideology must cover over these realities. Just as the neurotic is caught in pseudo aggressions, bourgeois politics cannot touch the masochistic core of the systemic dimension; to do so would risk losing control over the system of ideological maintenance.

Ideology is about covering over antagonisms, and as such it introduces us to the realism and nominalism debate in political philosophy and epistemology. My contention is that bourgeois ideology nominalizes the true dimension of social antagonisms and that it must do so with antagonisms that revolve around market domination and labor exploitation. The socialist-realist dimension to social and political antagonisms are thus ontologically rooted in economic forces that reigning bourgeois ideology will predictably falsify. The effects of this falsification are severe in bourgeois society because they tend to be about the irrationalism of the bourgeois private individual. The myth of the individual becomes a site of condensation where personal rivalry and narcissistic investments function as stand-in points for otherwise primary or secondary social contradictions. The neurotic cancels and avoids any confrontation with what Bergler calls their “real masochistic self” (p. 82) and

“guilt is accepted except for the lesser crime, pseudo-aggression, and the scene of the crime is shifted to the outside. The neurotic behaves as if he were guilty of “aggression,” and his fear seems to pertain to outside dangers” (p. 70).

It is important to stress that there is a class dimension to the problem of pseudo aggression. Specifically, I would argue that a task of ideology critique would be to locate the ways that ideological pseudo-aggression is championed by the class fraction of the petit-bourgeoise responsible for ensuring that surplus value extraction continue unabated. This class is the most proximate to the problem of pseudo aggression and they have a material interest in creating ideological accounts of social wrong and antagonism that limit any true touch with the realities that make the system of capital perpetuate and wreak harm.

A significant element of bourgeois ideology thus entails perpetuating pseudo aggressiveness to pacify those antagonisms that might otherwise elevate to a primary contradiction. This is what liberal civil society and the wider superstructure, or culture and aesthetic production, is all about. What glues bourgeois society together is a set of ideologies that pose antagonisms — particularly those that are responsible for justifying capital’s misery over social life — as sites of pseudo aggression. This means that bourgeois ideology is located not as a left or right expression of establishment parties or tendencies. Rather, both the right and the left bourgeois parties and their surrogate institutions such as the NGO sector are in the business of converting political and social “wrongs” that are borne from economic exploitation and class conflict into sites where alternate explanations are put in their place.

As you may have gathered, I’m interested in defining bourgeois politics as a set of identifiable tendencies which portend on to issues of truth – but this conception of truth is not based on a paradigm of truth as falsifiability and nor is it merely about truth as the principle of sufficient reason, although these methods of dealing with rational politics are important. Psychoanalysis does not reject these accounts of what qualifies as a wrong and what qualifies as an antagonism, I would argue that psychoanalysis rather helps us see that politics is indeed about truth – what many theorists refer to as “metapolitics”, or a politics about arriving at a settling of the score of truth that riddles the conflicts that circulate in the public sphere. Metapolitics is an interesting concept that often gets confounded and thereby lost in the maze of Heidegger’s irrationalist theory of ontological difference. Heideggerian metapolitics supposes that a truer form of politics will be uncovered in political action and this often entails a mystical or messianic dimension because Heidegger’s politics is rooted in a poetic conception of truth. Marxism has a version of metapolitics to be sure, and theorists from Rancière to Badiou have articulated compelling accounts of it.

Any politics that takes itself to be emancipatory must cultivate a concern with the truth of the situation and therefore with the effects that truth has on us as political agents. I am in favor of a materialist metapolitics that is construed on the idea that politics is about overcoming relations of exploitation, and the pursuit of this sort of politics does not grant the proletariat a superior spiritual or mystical access to higher truth. This metapolitics is different that the sort of metapolitics developed by Jacques Rancière which emphasizes how politics is about initiating a procedure of truth at the site of politics “wrongs.” Once dispute emerges of what qualifies as “wrong” – a metapolitical process is introduced to politics we begin to think about where truth really resides. If politics aims towards truth it requires that politics be engaged at a discursive level, that we enter the arena of bourgeois politics, and that we do so with the full knowledge and expectation that proletarian politics will not be tolerated, or put differently, that emancipatory demands are locatable within political discourse. Once we resign ourselves from this sort of possibility, we have adopted a form of leftist hyperpolitics that is content to rely on the power of spontaneous social movements.

But is the concept of ‘metapolitics’ necessary or is it better thought as a heuristic? I will argue for the latter point, namely that we can invoke the sort of politics that aims towards opening a more emancipatory horizon of political truth as ‘proletarian politics’ but this does politics does not ontologically separate the proletariat as some angelic other. This is a form of politics that requires the cultivation of political solidarity and the strengthening in collective capacity for coordinating class politics towards a more emancipatory and universal set of ends. This means that proletarian politics must entail the development of a distinct political epistemology of its own or it will risk falling into what I have elsewhere named the nominalist trap of bourgeois politics.

In my view it is essential that we define bourgeois politics as the politics of the ruling class, as a fundamentally coercive domain of politics. Bourgois ideology is indeed definable, and I would argue that a politics dominated by the two capitalist parties is a politics that insists that truth be far from the site of politics. Bourgeois politics prefers to be technocratic and efficient, it prefers to be far away from class struggle, but when class struggle rears its head it must fall back on ideology, i.e., on repetitive and continued investment in sites of falseness. False ways of thinking about social wrongs,

What all of this indicates is that bourgeois ideology condenses around points that obscure the real stakes of social and political conflict. It is only through proletarian politics and socialist politics that foster class independence politics that we can begin to re-conceive, and ultimately re-frame pseudo-aggressive politics.