NfD: The wound that never heals: Lacan meets Trump

Taken from notesfromdisgraceland:

There is an essential difference between natural laws and those governing social contexts like history or politics. The former have to be respected while the latter can be temporarily suspended and sometimes completely ignored. Denying gravity cannot be a long-lasting practice and could have dire consequences, but disobeying historical laws can often be done with impunity. During the epochs of paradigmatic social transitions there have been a number of instances when underlying political regimes would continue to function on borrowed time, even though everybody was aware that their time was over. Napoleon had to be defeated twice to get the point, the first time in 1813, in the battle of Leipzig, and the second time at Waterloo[1]. It is only through his repeated defeat that it became clear that his passing expressed a deeper historical necessity and not just an accident of history. In a similar way, although communism was effectively over even before the downfall of the Berlin wall, it continued to live on and is still alive and well, albeit in different forms, across parts of Eastern Europe and Asia. It will take another round of defeats before its self-destructiveness causes its final disappearance.

The last four years have felt like an attempt to subvert this hierarchy, through systematic efforts to downgrade the natural laws: Ignore mathematics, physics, biology, epidemiology, and common sense in general, and replace them with speech acts and palpable falsehoods. And although we knew all too well that this ridiculous effort could not last forever and would inevitably self-destruct, we were continuously surprised by how far it went on. Our perception of this project had been repeatedly revised as the boundaries of its validity continued to stretch, until they were finally torn apart. And, while this was not surprising, it is astonishing that the whole insane thing managed to survive for four years. How was this allowed to happen and how did we get to where we are now in 2020?

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