Political leaders merely launder citizens’ own disavowed desires rather than ruling them

Evidence

Withdrawal from the capital matrix entails an unplugging that will seem painful to nervous systems commensurated to the Reality-Pleasure Principle. Partly it means giving up the reassuring comforter of the Bad Father Figure and facing the fact that the G8 leaders are not capable of legislating away all planetary misery, but are “old men at the crossroads”, capital’s meat puppets not its masters. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us. If anyone is in charge in Kapital it is Oedipus Rex, i.e. us. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1422

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that electorates authorize their own domination through disavowed desire carries a dense psychoanalytic-political argument worth sitting with; most anti-G8/G20 commentary keeps the binary of enlightened protesters vs. corrupt elites Fisher collapses here.
• XREF: connects to: Political elites are servants who launder citizens’ own disavowed desires back to them. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1422; Power produces subjects and desires rather than merely repressing them — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 131

Broader Connections

• Political elites are servants who launder citizens’ own disavowed desires back to them. #corroborates (1.00) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1422
• Power produces subjects and desires rather than merely repressing them #expands (0.80) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 131