Margarita Palacios

Liberalism and conservatism in Chile: attitudes and opinions of Chilean women at the start of the twenty-first century

Based on a national survey of women and the creation of a ‘conservatism-liberalism index’, this study shows that conservatism in Chile has deep religious roots and continues to be the most significant symbolic reference point in womens lives. The study concludes also that the female population is drawn more towards a ‘liberal’ vision, but liberal attitudes are not able to provide an alternative symbolic reference point to conservatism. This is because liberalism seems to be the result of popular exposure to the requirements of modern life rather than a discourse or ideology. For this reason, the opinions and attitudes of women are highly contradictory and heterogeneous and do not find their form, for the most part, in a clearly liberal discourse or in one which is wholly conservative. We are thus dealing with a kind of ‘liberalism through exposure’, the limits of which are to be found in the conservative ideology which underlies the liberal opinions expressed and is clearly visible in the proportion of the population which is highly educated and deeply religious.Based on a national survey of women and the creation of a ‘conservatism-liberalism index’, this study shows that conservatism in Chile has deep religious roots and continues to be the most significant symbolic reference point in womens lives. The study concludes also that the female population is drawn more towards a ‘liberal’ vision, but liberal attitudes are not able to provide an alternative symbolic reference point to conservatism. This is because liberalism seems to be the result of popular exposure to the requirements of modern life rather than a discourse or ideology. For this reason, the opinions and attitudes of women are highly contradictory and heterogeneous and do not find their form, for the most part, in a clearly liberal discourse or in one which is wholly conservative. We are thus dealing with a kind of ‘liberalism through exposure’, the limits of which are to be found in the conservative ideology which underlies the liberal opinions expressed and is clearly visible in the proportion of the population which is highly educated and deeply religious.

On Sacredness and Transgression: Understanding Social Antagonism

In this paper, I argue that in order to theorize violence it is necessary to consider not only the “contingent/historical” character of particular expressions of violence, but also the more “permanent/meta-historical” character of social identities. That is, it is necessary not only to look at identities already constituted, but at the very process of constitution of social identities itself. Only then it is possible to see the schism that is inherent to every social identity. This schism between the particular (the empirical) and the universal (the transcendental moral horizon, which allows the articulation of social life) is what accounts for both freedom/social change and social antagonism. Social antagonism, expressed as social exclusion and violence, is a reaction to the fear of “social disintegration”; that is, the fear of the possibility of losing the “universal/moral horizon” that makes society possible. Further, I argue that violence expresses a paradoxical dynamic between morality and enjoyment. At the same time that it attempts to restore the threatened symbolic order (that makes society possible), violence constitutes the ultimate transgression of that symbolic order.

On Infinite Criticality

Throughout the previous six chapters I have exposed the paradoxical dynamics that involve subject and meaning formation, and the challenges that the logic of exclusion — which accompanies any social identity — poses to subjectivity, intersubjective encounters and social life in general. In front of this aporia, of the vicissitudes of being in language, social theorists and philosophers — embracing different political and conceptual agendas — tend to turn their research either into utopian ethical theories of wit(h)nessing and recognition (which aim to find a secure place from where to assert belonging as prior to violence), or into studies of the insurmountable exclusion which takes place in any social formation. Particularly relevant, within this broad categorization and in conceptual engagement with the topic of my research, are the works of Bracha Ettinger and Giorgio Agamben. In their analysis of the relation between language and being, both authors focus in particular on the ‘vicissitudes’ of the body, and how this becomes the site of models of mutuality (in the case of Ettinger) or of the experience of violence (in the case of Agamben). That is to say, while the former attempts to offer an alternative to the otherwise ‘necessary’ castration-anxiety dynamics which have been described in the previous chapters as pertaining to our being in language (in particular, by drawing a model of mutuality based on the relationship between mother and child before birth), the latter demonstrates how the law is inextricably linked to violence, and how sovereignty precisely refers to the capacity of blurring the distinction between the two of them (in particular, as experienced in the state of ‘exception’).

Decolonizing Trauma and the Ethics of Anxious Witnessing

Psychoanalytically informed research on political violence has shown time and again that political violence involves social and cultural processes of othering and libidinal dynamics of desire and enjoyment, usually associated with processes of ‘feminization’ of those excluded others. This complex nature of political violence begs rethinking of the conceptual and political challenges that post-conflict societies face in their transitions to democracy. For what have been mobilized in the violent events are not only ‘the strategic interests’ of determinate social groups in their struggle for power, but also a whole array of symbolic displacements (that justify exclusion according to dynamics of desire and aggressive jealousy) and, more disturbingly, the ‘acting out’ of those fantasy scenarios and the enjoyment of the suffering of the other. This complex situation disqualifies traditional actor-centred approaches which delineate a clear-cut dichotomy between victims and perpetrators, leaving bystanders — or civil society in general — out of the picture and bearing no responsibility whatsoever.

Hermeneutics and the Art of Disobedience

One of the main shortcomings of social theory has been its incapacity to theorize the paradox inherent in the simultaneous experience of power and separation from power that characterizes social life. It is for this reason that most theories either account for power formations (i.e., post-structuralism) or only give account of the process of ‘giving meaning’ (Weberian cultural sociology). While the first one is unable to theorize subjectivity and reduces meaning formation to semantic displacements, the latter reduces social formations to subjective interpretations. Although within the tradition of sociology symbolic interactionism is seen as capable of overcoming such difficulty (as it theorizes that middle ground where intersubjective negotiation takes place), from the perspective of my research, such an approach ultimately fails to capture the radicality of this paradox as it simply reduces it to the realm of those experiences which can actually be ‘negotiated’.1

Fantasy, Otherness and Violence

In the previous two chapters, and from a philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective, I theorized the notion of the void — absence, death, blank space — as the starting point, or even condition of possibility of meaning formation, subjectivity and historicity. In this context, the reading of Lacan’s Seminar X became particularly helpful to start articulating what seemed at first sight a mere existential question into the material reality of the body. The notion of anxiety as theorized in this Seminar served to build a bridge between the abstract notion of language and the physical character of meaning formation and desire. As we saw at the end of the previous chapter, to theorize anxiety as linked to the void was also a way to start grasping the paradoxes, aporias and vicissitudes that cross identity formation and the relation self-other. Furthermore, the notion of anxiety pointed in the direction of action, a notion that confronts us with ethics, responsibility and certainly politics.

Rethinking Melancholia: Inclusion without Recognition?

In the previous chapters we have seen how psychoanalytic theory has demonstrably helped in the conceptual analysis of processes of social exclusion and violence, and the libidinal dynamics involved in processes otherwise regarded as exclusively social and political. This conceptual ‘success’ — particularly in the use of fantasy — has in my view not been paralleled in the use of notions of narcissism (i.e. ‘the new culture of narcissism’) or by the current use of the notion of emancipatory melancholia. As I showed in the last chapter, in particular the understanding of some aspects of the phenomenon of youth violence seem to require some fresh perspective. Current accounts of individualization and narcissism — by stating that current forms of social violence result from the failure of the paternal law and, therefore, from the lack of the establishment of prohibition — not only reproduce punitive and conservative ideological discourses that further exclude the already ‘racialized’ and ‘feminized’ youth (precisely by attempting to reestablish the authority of the supposedly lacking ‘law’), but also entirely ignore the pitfalls and paradoxes of the constitution of identities through exclusion and the imposition of the ‘law’ (as elaborated in previous chapters). Although not apparently surmountable, these pitfalls and paradoxes are still clearly in need of further scrutiny and criticality.

From Narcissism to Melancholia

In the previous chapter, and through the discussion of a variety of cases of ‘othering’, we could see how the mechanism of fantasy, and particularly in a socio-political context where it is associated to forms of nationalist rhetoric, the excluded other is perceived as a threat to the identity of the (national) community. Furthermore, fantasy informed us about how the relation of ambiguous antagonism is also an experience of desire and enjoyment. As fantasy has been theorized from a Lacanian perspective, that is, as having the function of covering lack (securing consistency of meaning) and of experiencing enjoyment (by situating the desired/abjected object in the place of ‘a’), we could claim that fantasy is primarily associated with the pitfalls of the life of the signifier (as expressed in the notions of alienation and separation), and as such, as expressing forms of ‘phallic enjoyment’. As research in the field shows, the process of othering, in the context of patriarchal nationalist discourses, is associated with the feminization of the other: the feminine other appears as what threatens the stability of the self. As Meyda Yegenoglu shows in her research on the veil in Algeria, what gets constituted through this construction/exclusion of the ‘feminine Oriental other’ (i.e. through the construction of ‘Orientalism’) is the masculine Western subject.

Death, Anxiety and the Vicissitudes of Action

In the previous chapter, and from a purely semantic perspective, I theorized the existential incompleteness of meaning formation and put forward some introductory ideas about how this ‘opening’ affects or is translated in social formations. The purpose was to set up a conceptual platform to start analysing the delicate balance between the ‘not-yet’ of the process of meaning formation and its disobedient potential, and the hegemonies, or forms of power, which are established when meaning — even if precariously — is consolidated. This way of conceptualizing incompleteness — or non-wholeness — brought to the forefront of the analysis the undecidability which characterizes any meaning formation, and also, as Derrida argued, the moment of decision (action) which in complex ways point towards the realm of ethics and responsibility, and, as we will see, also in complex ways towards death and violence.

The Meaning of Anti-Communism in Chile

In order to understand the cultural and social dimension of the violence that emerged in Chile in 1973 I have proposed to work with the notion of fantasy and I have mentioned universality, antagonism, sexuality and hate as its basic components.