I was interested in the title of this table “Democracy and (its) Unconscious” proposed by Marco Mauas: it suggests that like a subject, Democracy would have, perhaps, an Unconscious. Jacques Lacan once said that the Unconscious is Politics, which is not exactly the same thing, because the principle of this proposal of J. Lacan is that the Unconscious is at the very origin of the social link that Politics establishes. The proposal of this table makes a jump between the register of the subject and the social register of Democracy. This could seem like an extrapolation, if it were not for the fact that Freud himself, at the beginning of his Massenpsychology (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), emphasizes that the social is nothing other than the extension of the subjective. “The Unconscious of Democracy” sounds like the famous sentence that the Spanish painter Goya wrote under one of his drawings: “the sleep of reason breeds monsters”. I don’t know exactly if there is an unconscious of democracy, but it certainly has symptoms: some of them have been reported lately, in France at least and in some of the great Western democracies. Crisis of representativeness, drift towards autocracy and towards what has been erroneously called  “illiberal democracy”, corruption of the judicial system and political co-option of judges, criminalization and repression of protest. These shifts are each certainly symptoms of different things, and each would merit at least a lecture!

It is not certain, and at the risk of provocation, that the Unconscious such as analysis formulates it, knows and is flexible to democratic functioning.  The Unconscious structured like a language supposes the permanent signification of one signifier by another, and the primacy of a signifier that Lacan qualified as the Master. This work of deciphering does not know any argumentative or contradictory debate as in political meetings, nor does it know any diversity. It is therefore not certain that it is compatible with democracy, where tolerance of diversity and minorities prevails over authoritarianism and autocracy. This does not mean that psychoanalysis defends this type of government, because it really needs a democratic and rather liberal economic system to function: The history of psychoanalysis in the socialist countries of the 20th Century has demonstrated this well.

As I listened to Perla’s talk, I thought that perhaps the distinction between State and Nation that she introduced might correspond to the classical distinction that Hegel makes between State and civil society. The State as a guarantee, as a legal framework and background where civil society finds its place. Society presents variations of forms that change throughout time and that question each time the model of the State in effect. An intrinsic tension thus exists between the State and the civil society which can take various forms and which we could classify on the side of the negative which works the interior of each democracy by producing some of its symptoms. The Nation as a name for civil society imposes permanent and dialectical modifications on the concept of the State, and it is this movement that we have seen in recent years in Israeli politics. This is a worldwide shift in identity from which we cannot see why Israeli society should remain unaffected. With certain characteristics of its own, of course, which must be properly situated in order not to fall into erroneous and crude approximations.

In Israel, the multiparty system and government coalitions, practiced for decades, particularly limit any drift towards the installation of an autocracy. Judicial independence free of political constraints exists, as do inalienable constitutional rights and a free press. Despite what journalists and political analysts, here in France at least, have written in recent years, democracy in Israel has a dynamism that prevents a drift towards what is misnamed “illiberal democracies”. An article in Ha’Aretz on March 22 by Alon Pinkas rightly pointed out why, for all these reasons, Israel cannot be classified as an illiberal democracy, beyond the fact that this term implies a contradiction in terms. This was seen once again with the latest alliance between Benett and Lapid. Unlike the United States, where two major parties alternate in power, having to negotiate each time with a majority in both legislative chambers, in Israel it is the small parties that balance the democratic game in the game of alliances.

Political analysts point to the end of the 1970s, with the victory of Menachem Beguin and Likud, and the alliances with the still small parties of the religious right, as the beginning of an identity-based drift that seems to restrict more and more the broad project with which Israel was created. Certainly, the first and second Intifadas have passed by, the peace with Jordan, the Oslo Accords, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the departure of the IDF occupation of Gaza in 2005 without any prior agreement, and the rise of Hamas since then.

The scuffles between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews, which accompanied the latest Hamas rocket attacks, are an example of this rift in Israeli society, which has existed for some years now, and which will take a long time to be mended. It is certainly a symptom of what is at work in the heart of civil society against the project of a state tolerant of diversity.

The promotion of the «Israel Law, Nation State of the Jewish People», adopted by the Knesset in 2018, was probably already an indicator of this identitarian drift: Although it recalled some of the basic laws of the state, it also contained other more sensitive elements such as the definition of Jerusalem as the «complete and unified» capital of Israel, the downgrading of the Arabic language, which was until then the second language of the state, making Hebrew the only state language, and the encouragement as a «national value» the development of Jewish communities, which may jeopardize the status of the Arab and Druze minority communities.

There is thus a tension between the One and the many that certainly works on democracy as an essentially plural mode of government. This tension produces a push towards the One of non-differentiation that threatens the plural spirit of democracy.  It is called an autocratic and authoritarian drift in current democracies. It is perhaps this push towards the One that Marco proposed to name under the form of the unconscious of the democracy. E pluribus unum (from many, one) is the term that the independent North American colonies of England adopted in 1776 to name the project of the melting pot where all free men were going to merge, that the founding fathers wanted for America. The European Union adopted the motto In varietate concordia («Unity in diversity») in 2000, closer to the project of the Israeli civil society. Here is my question: Will this exceptional State that is Israel in the concert of countries in the World also lead it to find inwardly, in its civil society, a form that is exceptional in maintaining a diverse and plural project against the forces that draw it towards the One of national identity? In this case, it will have found a know-how with its Unconscious.

 

Fabian Fajnwaks  is psychoanalist, he lives in Paris.

Director of the Revue La Cause du Desir, Member of ECF, EOL and AMP. AE 2015 -2018.

*Text presented in the panel «Democracy and ( its) unconscious». Activity organized as part of the annual “Night of philosophy», in Tel Aviv by the French Consulate.