Caleb Smith reviews Disavowal

Alenka Zupančič. Disavowal. Hoboken, N.J.: Polity Press, 2024. 162 pp.

24 October 2024

While I was reading Alenka Zupančič’s brilliant new book, two massive hurricanes, Helène and Milton, went churning through the southeastern United States. The storms were so powerful, so destructive, that they seemed almost unnatural. Conspiracy theories swirled around. Online, right-wing commentators floated the idea that the disasters had been cooked up by the US government.

Right away, of course, liberals sensed a bitter irony in the right’s disinformation campaign. The very people who refused to accept well-founded climate science—which shows how human activity causes the warming that strengthens the storms—were quick to promote a crackpot story about the deep state playing god. In the liberal account, the far right’s denial of the climate crisis is the main obstacle to climate action. And so the solution would seem to start with accepting the truth. If we really believed what science told us, we would come to the obvious conclusion that we have to stop accelerating the catastrophe.

But Zupančič observes, disturbingly, that that there is no necessary link between our understanding and our actions. It is one thing to stop denying climate change. It is another, far more difficult thing to stop changing the climate. Many, in fact most people in the contemporary West have come to accept the facts—and yet what difference does our knowledge make? We may adjust our consumption habits, or we might vote for the center-left’s green initiatives. On the whole, however, we go on participating in the systems (economic and political) that created the disaster. Zupančič sees this pattern as a symptom of perversion, and she lays out a comprehensive diagnosis. Disavowal is a concise book, yet it analyzes nothing less than “our general social state of mind” (p. 4)

In ordinary language, disavowal has a range of meanings. Zupančič is using the term in a technical sense derived from psychoanalysis. Freud, in his preliminary work on disavowal, imagined a primal scene where a young boy sees a naked girl or woman for the first time. Noticing the absence of a penis, the boy is shaken by castration anxiety; if she has lost hers, he worries, then he might lose his own. To protect himself against the perceived threat, he disavows it, unconsciously refusing to accept what his eyes perceive.

Freud did not clearly distinguish disavowal from other kinds of repression, but later theorists elaborated its special meaning and function. In a classic 1964 essay, the French analyst Octave Mannoni proposed that disavowal, unlike denial, actually allows one to acknowledge the truth, indeed to know all about it—without quite abiding by its consequences. Disavowal finds expression in the phrase “Je sais bien, mais quand même”: I know very well, but all the same (p. 22). For instance, I know very well that astrology is bogus, but all the same I read my horoscope and follow its advice. I do not see myself as a superstitious person. But all the same, I act in a way that looks, from the outside, completely foolish.

Here, in the division between people’s professed rationality and their irrational behavior, Zupančič finds her leverage point, radically expanding the theory of disavowal. Rather than a harmless aberration (like fetishism), she argues, disavowal has become a feature of normal, mainstream culture itself. We know very well that we are destroying the planet, we seem to say, but all the same we go on with business as usual, growing the economy and propping up our faltering governments.

Even worse, the well-informed majority keeps pointing to denial, keeps blaming cranks and grifters, as an excuse for its own paralysis. And so, as Zupančič argues, “we seem to be caught in a macabre dance in which denial (often associated with ‘populism’), on the one hand, and perverse disavowal (associated with the business-as-usual mainstream), on the other, constitute two principal and competing political options, each fuelling the other with their respective pathologies” (p. 4). On one side, Trumpist conspiracy theorists; on the other, pro-business, pro-growth Democrats. While they two-step, the flood tides keep rising.

In an illuminating chapter on disavowal’s dialectical counterpart, Zupančič explains right-wing conspiracy theories not as cynical disinformation campaigns used to undermine the public’s trust in science but as a kind of consolation for the powerless. If the elites who run the world are taking pains to mystify us ordinary people, the conspiracist presumes, then they must depend, at some level, on our opinion. They must really care what we think. Paranoia is a fear of being deceived, but it is also the fantasy that we are worth lying to.

Is disavowal, likewise, a sign of powerlessness? For most of us, I suspect, the kind of disavowal that Zupančič describes is rather an effect of our political weakness than a cause of it. I am tempted to say that the annihilation of our subjectivity, in the political sense, has already been accomplished; it is perhaps the fact of this loss, rather than the threat of a future one, that we most wish to disavow.

A society is not a psyche, and no act of analysis alone is going to cure its perversions. The radical critique of liberalism’s failings has a way of becoming a stalling technique in its own right: Analyzing other people’s pathologies, like believing in facts, is easier than overthrowing capitalism. But Zupančič does not fall into either despair or endless critique. She nurtures a sense of possibility for a different future; she calls us “to take into account the impossible real of what is happening, and mobilize, organize on the grounds of its truth” (p. 14). The macabre dance of reactionary delusions and liberal common sense awaits the reawakening of a third figure, a revolutionary movement answering to what everyone already knows.