Socio-political continuity as a struggle of clinical structures. A Lacanian approach to political narratives

Abstract

The article shows how the tools of Lacanian psychoanalysis can be used to study the socio-political field while analysing the phenomenon of socio-political continuity and Polish political identifications during the first months of the Russian aggression in Ukraine. The first part of the text discusses the basic categories of Lacanian theory to be used to study the subject’s identity (fantasy, clinical structures). The author argues that these categories can be used to analyse political narratives in order to extract the underlying affective interests of the subjects constructing these narratives. The author also shows how these categories are used by other researchers for socio-political analysis: they successfully describe the revolutionary succession of socio-political orders constructed in accordance with one of the three clinical structures listed by Lacan. However, the author, in the second part of the text, uses the example of Pol-ish political narratives about the war in Ukraine — to show that the socio-political field at any moment is full of many different, competing political narratives, each structured in a way char-acteristic of one of the clinical structures. This means that the socio-political field is a space where various affective interests of community members clash, and the stake in constructing various political narratives is the extension of their own interests to as large a part of society as possible. As a consequence, the socio-political plane of continuity turns out to be a dynamic and open space to a much greater extent than the very notion of continuity suggests.