Rethinking Melancholia: Inclusion without Recognition?

Abstract

In the previous chapters we have seen how psychoanalytic theory has demonstrably helped in the conceptual analysis of processes of social exclusion and violence, and the libidinal dynamics involved in processes otherwise regarded as exclusively social and political. This conceptual ‘success’ — particularly in the use of fantasy — has in my view not been paralleled in the use of notions of narcissism (i.e. ‘the new culture of narcissism’) or by the current use of the notion of emancipatory melancholia. As I showed in the last chapter, in particular the understanding of some aspects of the phenomenon of youth violence seem to require some fresh perspective. Current accounts of individualization and narcissism — by stating that current forms of social violence result from the failure of the paternal law and, therefore, from the lack of the establishment of prohibition — not only reproduce punitive and conservative ideological discourses that further exclude the already ‘racialized’ and ‘feminized’ youth (precisely by attempting to reestablish the authority of the supposedly lacking ‘law’), but also entirely ignore the pitfalls and paradoxes of the constitution of identities through exclusion and the imposition of the ‘law’ (as elaborated in previous chapters). Although not apparently surmountable, these pitfalls and paradoxes are still clearly in need of further scrutiny and criticality.