This article provides a psychoanalytic–materialist critique of liberal democracy. It argues that the failures of liberalism are structurally necessary, founded in property, ideology and affect. Liberalism survives through the ritualisation of deferral, where disappointment generates loyalty as dissatisfaction is domesticated through civic repetition. Deploying Freud's death drive, psychoanalysis is presented as a diagnostic tool for tracing how institutions structure desire through failed performance. This libidinal economy, consolidated by ideological apparatuses of reproduction and possessive individualism, secures subjects in stable attachments through its management of disappointment. Participation is rearticulated as attachment to process rather than outcome; melancholia operates as modality of governance. Against reformist and agonistic theories, the article contends that liberalism is beyond reform and that the challenge to respond to its crisis must work outside its grammar. It calls for an unbinding of political desire from the apparatuses that displace and defuse failure into fidelity.
AhmedS (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
2.
AlthusserL (1971) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press, 121–176.
3.
BaranPASweezyPM (1966) Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York: Monthly Review Press.
4.
BenjaminW (1978) Critique of violence. In: DemetzP (eds) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books, 277–300.
5.
BerlantL (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
6.
BrennanT (2004) The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
7.
BrownW (2001) Politics Out of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
8.
BrownW (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.
9.
BrownW (2019) In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press.
10.
ConstantB (1819/1988) The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns. In: FontanaB (eds) Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 309–328.
DeanJ (2009) Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
13.
de TocquevilleA (1835/2000) Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
14.
DownsA (1972) Up and down with ecology: The issue-attention cycle. Public Interest28: 38–50.
15.
FanonF (1961) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
16.
FraserN (2003) Social justice in the age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition, and participation. In: FraserNHonnethA (eds) Redistribution or Recognition?London: Verso, 7–109.
17.
FreudS (1920/1955) Beyond the pleasure principle. In: In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 (1920–1922). London: Hogarth Press, 1–64.
18.
GeussR (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
19.
GramsciA (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
20.
HabermasJ (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
21.
HallS (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
22.
HarveyD (2010) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23.
IllichI (1973) Tools for Conviviality. London: Harper and Row.
24.
JosephJ (2013) Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: A governmentality approach. Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses1(1): 38–52.
25.
KantI (1785/1998) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26.
LaclauE (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
27.
LaingR (1967) The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon Books.
28.
LaslettP, ed. (1689/1988) Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29.
LeninVI (1917/1964) State and Revolution. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
30.
LevitskySZiblattD (2018) How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing.
31.
MacphersonC (1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
32.
MarcuseH (1955) Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press.
33.
MarcuseH (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
34.
MillJS (1859/1991) On Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
35.
MillJS (1861/1991) Considerations on Representative Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
36.
MontesquieuC (1748/1989The Spirit of the LawsCohlerAMillerCStoneH (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 154–187.
37.
MouffeC (2000) The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
38.
MounkY (2018) The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
