1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910735385503321

Autore

Bafoil François

Titolo

The politics of destruction : three contemporary configurations of hallucination : USSR, Polish PiS Party, Islamic State / / Francois Bafoil

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham, Switzerland : , : Palgrave Macmillan, , [2021]

©2021

ISBN

3-030-81942-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource

Collana

The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy

Disciplina

363.325

Soggetti

Totalitarianism - Psychological aspects

Hallucinations and illusions - Political aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Chapter One: Psychoanalysis and History. The Unconscious and Reason -- Chapter Two: The Matrix of the Totalitarian System. The Hallucinated Soviet Personality -- Chapter Three: The Law and Justice party in Poland. Family romances, national romances -- Chapter Four: The personality of the jihadist terrorist. Atemporal spaces of terror -- Chapter Five: The Unconscious and Political Science. A Freudian Reading of Weberian Types of Domination -- Chapter Six: Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

When applied to social science, psychoanalytic concepts make it possible to analyze totalitarian action and its derivative, authoritarian action, by highlighting what such regimes have in common: the destruction of frames of reference for space and time; their replacement of those reference points with a restrictive "surreality" and the assignation of individuals in the social space in terms of the love or hatred attributed to them by those in power. Whether in Stalinist Bolshevism, posited here as the matrix of the "totalitarian personality" in its extreme form of totalitarianism with the Islamic State; or in a more diluted variant in the Polish ruling party Law and Justice (PiS), each is characterized by the negation of temporal and spatial distance, and therefore by the negation of causal links, displacement and transformation of experience. These components are specific to the unconscious which, in dreams as Freud considered, acts upon factual datum, denies it, and reproduces it in another way, one that conforms



more closely to the dreamers desires. For this reason, the politics that arise from these regimes have much in common with a hallucination. Francois Bafoil is an Emeritus Senior researcher, CNRS, at the Center for international research (CERI) Sciences Po, Paris, France. An expert of eastern Europe and energy politics, he is also a specialist of the relationship between psychoanalysis and social sciences, through the figures of Freud and Weber.