Adam Phillips in ‘Equals’ discusses the connection between superiority and conflict and the necessity of requisite conflict in maintaining democracy:
“When we envisage democratic politics from … an anti-essentialist perspective,” Chantal Mouffe writes In the Democratic Paradox, “we can begin to understand that for democracy to exist, no social agent should be able to claim any mastery of the foundation of society.” … no one in a democracy, in Mouffe’s account, has a superiority guaranteed in advance, at least when they are acting democratically.
Defining antagonism as the struggle between enemies, and agonism as the struggle between adversaries, Mouffe proposes what she calls “agonistic pluralism.”
“The aim of democratic politics,” she writes, “is to transform antagonism into agonism … one of the keys to the thesis of agonistic pluralism is that far from jeopardising democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order … a democratic society acknowledges the pluralism of values.”
We are more likely, for example, to feel superior to our enemies than our adversaries. Indeed, the whole idea of an enemy makes the idea of superiority possible if not plausible (it may not be enemies we are in pursuit of, but states of inner superiority.)
If we use Mouffe’s picture as what used to be called a model of the mind – and what I would prefer to call a conjecture about what people are really like – and if we map our model of democracy back onto what some psychoanalysts call the internal world, we will at first find a great deal of reassurance. Is it not, after all, one of the aims of at least some versions of psychoanalysis to transform enemies into adversaries; to free a person to be at odds with himself (and others) rather than in lethal combat. If agonistic confrontation is the very condition of democracy’s existence, can we not say by the same token, conflict is the individual’s life support system? And yet, of course, psychoanalytic schools can be defined by the internal and external points of view they are prepared to credit. What, for example, would be an internal pluralism of values? Could the racism of the South find a voice here, and what kind of voice would that be? What is perhaps most interesting in Mouffe’s formulation is the definition of the authoritarian as that which suppresses conflict. As though it is the very existence of conflict itself that certain versions of authority cannot bear. And this might be a clue to what is intolerable about equality. What the person whose superiority is guaranteed in advance cannot bear is the protracted sustaining, indeed existence of conflict. Equality, then, is the legitimation of, if not the celebration of, conflict. Is it then possible, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to think of a person as – or a free person to be – internally adversarial?
Slingshot