The language game of Europe: Politics, identity, and the divided subject

Abstract

The paper discusses the psychoanalytic interpretative possibilities for understanding Europe's reluctance to accept the UK's decision to leave the union. It develops an interpretation based on Lucan’s concept of 'Name of the Father' to inquire whether the 'European identity' is in fact a neurotic identity, marked by a blocked presence of the primary Lacanian psychoanalytic signifier and the resultant erratic and ineffective policy which can be considered as a group equivalent of the neurotic symptoms that, in psychoanalysis, are treated as primary individual symptoms. This perspective aims to test the limits of the debate over whether psych diagnostics can be applied to political collectives as well as to individuals, and attempts to do so by drawing parallels between the behavior of individual people, on the one hand, and institutions, on the other.