Powering Down On Authority (English and Dutch). Avital Ronell

own limit “obscurely, obstinately, and repetitively,” and proceeds by an “impressive series of admissions of defeat or incompletion”—what they also call, when considering his quasi-system, “the (false / true) modesty and the hyperbolic circumspection” of his work—and poses two fundamental questions.¹⁰ The first of these questions asks how the subject supports itself. This problem, which they all raise, is especially important when one considers that the subject, the substance, is supposed to be the support and now is found wanting support in order to be. The second question interrogates authority, involving its paternal, political, and psychoanalytic dimensions, and thus bringing us back to a basic disturbance in any thought on authority, namely, “how does authority authorize itself?”¹¹ By the time Freud reaches Civilization and Its Discontents (first published in German as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930), his thought effectively “bears the mark of the renunciation of the idea of a decisive amelioration of society (by psychoanalysis in particular) such as one found it in previous texts (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious especially).”¹² The end of Civilization gestures towards, and hopes that, one day the cure of society will be taken up. But the practical obstacle to “surmount in this undertaking will be that of ‘the authority necessary to impose such a therapy upon the group [Masse]’.”¹³ The question for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy becomes: “How could psychoanalysis endow itself with this authority? How could this authority be analyzed?”¹⁴ The political is seen to encounter its limit here, where authority gathers up the limit-question of power over the meeting grounds of psychoanalysis and politics (a.k.a. collective neurosis).

      Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy wrap up a discussion of the contrast (Gegensatz) between social and narcissistic mental acts—“the contrast of the social and individual falls within the limits of psychoanalysis”¹⁵—with a situating statement that further guides their argument:

      The Freudian science is by rights a science of culture, and consequently a political science. Even and precisely if it turns out that this right gives rise to the greatest difficulties, indeed to the greatest disorder, and to the threat [...] of a theoretical panic.¹⁶