IN SEARCH OF EVIL: AFFECTIVE DIMENSIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 2018 IN GEORGIA

Abstract

The paper discusses how employing theoretical elements and interpretive frames of psychoanalytic anthropology, particularly from Lacanian perspective, help to conceptualize and analyze the affective dimensions in elections by creation the image of enemy as evil. Psychoanalytical theoretical vocabulary became the main source to capture affective dimension of politics by analyzing the texts, images and discourse how various emotions are signified in political speech. Election as a conventional public activity involves different political parties declaring their political values and competing to convince the large groups of population to vote for and follow specific discourses in order to get the majority in elections and win by setting parameters through which desire is produced, regulated and channeled (Kolvraa, 2018). The common knowledge of building the electoral discourses involves construction of image of enemy, evil, that has to carry the guilt for the perpetual postponement of utopia (Zizek, 1990), i.e. fulfillment of the emotional pull of certain political ideas. By Lacan human subject is never integrated into the symbolic world of language and traced by feelings of something loss and driven by the desire to recapture the lost enjoyment. By Glynos (2010), Starvakakis (2007) and Zizek (2005) this framework was used to understand the affective dimensions of ideological discourses. “This means that ideological discourses must produce fantasmatic narratives or scenarios which promise a utopian future of full satisfaction” (Kolvraa, 2018). In narratives like fascism, radical nationalism, Stalinism loss of enjoyment is replaced as a “stolen” by the enemy than contributes to maintain expectation of impossible – “a return to the fullness of jouisance in a utopian society” (Kolvraa, 2018). However the question of enjoyment still remains open in terms of affective dimension of political discourse – how it is achieved by the discourses of regaining of lost or defeating the enemy. We are analyzing the concrete presidential elections in Georgia, former soviet and new democratic country as a multidimensional social phenomenon coming from Stalinist and nationalist authoritarian past straggling to establish democratic institutions, laws and regulations, implementing elections as a main source of democratic governance. The case of last presidential elections is discussed as ambiguous model where discourses of enemy is floating form lost to stolen enjoyment of utopian society