Trump, 2016, and the Neo-Negation of Government

...the First Negation

In "States of Injury", Wendy Brown refers to the same logic of the dialectical process when she emphasizes how the first reaction of the oppressed to their oppression is that they imagine a world simply deprived of the Other that exerts oppression on them - women imagine a world without men, African-Americans a world without whites, workers a world without capitalists... The mistake of such an attitude is not that it is 'too radical', that it wants to annihilate the Other instead of merely changing it; but, on the contrary, that it is not radical enough: it fails to examine the way the identity of its own position (that of a worker, a woman, an African-American...) is 'mediated' by the Other (there is no worker without a capitalist organizing th production process, etc.), so that if one is to get rid of the oppressive Other, one has substantially to transform the content of one's own position. That is the fatal flaw of precipitate historicization: those who want 'free sexuality delivered of the Oedipal burden of guilt and anxiety' proceed in the same way as the worker who wants to survive as a worker without a capitalist; they also fail to take into account the way their own position is 'mediated' by the Other. The well-known Mead-Malinowski myth of the free, non-inhibited sexuality reigning in the South Pacific provides an exemplary case of such an 'abstract negation': it merely projects into the spatio-historical Other of 'primitive societies' the fantasy of a 'free sexuality' rooted in its own historical context. In this way, it is not 'historical' enough: it remains caught in the coordinates of one's own historical horizon precisely in its attempts to imagine a 'radical' Otherness - in short, anti-Oedipus is the ultimate Oedipal myth...

This mistake tells us a lot about the Hegelian 'negation of the negation': its matrix is not that of loss and its recuperation, but simply that of a process of passage from state A to state B: the first, immediate 'negation' of A negates the position of A while remaining within its symbolic confines, so it must be followed by another negation, which then negates the very symbolic space common to A and its immediate negation (the reign of a religion is first subverted in the guise of a theological heresy; capitalism is first subverted in the name of a 'reign of Labour'). Here the gap that separates the negated system's 'real' death from its' 'symbolic' death is crucial; the system has to die twice.

- Slavoj Zizek, "The Ticklish Subject"