1. Manic “Change Round”
In Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the melancholic is in want of an object, never knowing exactly what they may have lost. Melancholy transforms the object-loss of mourning into an ego-loss; consequently, psychic conflict is internalized in the form of a splitting of the ego against itself, one part representing the lost object, the other seeking—however destructively—to end its reign over the self. Freud suggests that this occurs because, as Otto Rank had previously argued, the object choice was narcissistic in the first place. In a desperate attempt at its survival, therefore, the love-relation represented by the lost object is replayed within the ego; but, since it must inevitably be abandoned (as is the case in regular mourning), this nevertheless entails powerfully self-destructive feelings that are destined to intensify. Melancholia, as such, “borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism,” as Freud puts it; in other words, the melancholic ambivalence of the love-relation is incorporated into—and, indeed, reinforced within—the narcissistic situation itself. And yet sufferers “usually still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their loved one through their illness.” Part of the cathexis has therefore regressed in the direction of narcissistic identification, leading to an obsessional hostility of the self towards itself; while another aspect “has been carried back to the stage of sadism” which arises as a form of protest brought about by the conflict and ambivalence inherent in the object-relation itself.
But “the most remarkable characteristic of melancholia, and the one in most need of explanation, is its tendency to change round into mania—a state which is the opposite of it in its symptoms.” Freud immediately confesses himself ill-equipped to explain such mania. He admits that little is yet known of the economic means by which mourning is brought to an end, namely the specific process by which psychic energies are redistributed that allows it to reach a conclusion. Much less can be said of the obscure psychic economy by which melancholia as a distorted type of mourning is itself converted into joyful manic triumph. Freud’s analysis implies that what can be said about mania is intrinsically linked to the limits of representation, as if the condition itself depends on a constitutive gap, a powerful yet dangerous ellipsis at the heart of psychoanalytic knowledge.
Finally, Freud suggests that it is the regression of the libido into the ego itself that marks the difference between mourning and melancholia, thus providing the likely explanation for a manic turn. Here, the importance assumed by the “shadow of the object” is recognized, casting its libidinal shade over the ego itself. Mania happens because that particular “shadow” is cast in the vicinity of a highly narcissistic personality, for whom libidinal intrusion into the space of the ego is much more possible—even likely. The key components of mania—heightened narcissism, an obscure economy of libidinal energy, the torment of others, and a self-destructiveness that is recalcitrant to analysis—all of this constitutes and informs a certain turn which we might describe as manic.
2. Hitlermania
Mein Kampf expresses the deep shame of being a German in the face of excessive praise for the great culture-nation (große Kulturnation) of France, observing that a crazed Frenchified tone so pervaded the world newspapers (Weltzeitungen) that Adolf Hitler felt obliged to throw them away; meanwhile, he insists that the German youth movement (die junge Bewegung) should be understood as part of the masses of workers who must be torn away from what he calls the international folly or delusion (internationalen Wahne) if a unified nation is to be lifted out of cultural misery and social distress. Of young people, Hitler declares it a great pity how Germany’s youth is prone to those fashionable crazes (Modewahnsinn) which put a negative spin on the old saying, “the clothes make the man.” As chairman of the party, he tells us that he rooted out the self-styled know-alls afflicted by a kind of illness (förmlichen Krankheit), namely one of sniffing around behind everything so as to hatch plans that inevitably remained unrealised. At the same time, Hitler calls the founders of new copycat parties political kleptomaniacs (politischer Kleptomane). Indeed, several of these effects—or affects—of human psychological excitation have been translated for English readers as “mania,” whether it be a certain Francophilia or fashionable internationalism or a love of power or knowledge or just a penchant for clothes.
Hitler rails at a pervasive mania for objectivity—Objektivitätsfimmel—which he likens to a collective addiction. Objectivity brings a sickly sense of justice that is injurious to the German state; it defines the woeful paralysis of parliamentary politics; it acts as camouflage for bourgeois, Marxist, or Jewish interests. Objectivity names a feckless attitude that impedes the German will, which should itself be backed by force wherever necessary. And yet this rejection of objectivity renders its proponents as willfully unobjective as the advocates of objectivity actually are. For Hitler, the exponent of objectivity and its detractor have one thing in common: both ultimately appreciate objectivity as a clandestine instrument for partial and self-serving interests. But from this perspective (and notwithstanding the various distinctions between health and sickness, sanity and insanity, and so on, that recur throughout Mein Kampf), it becomes difficult to step outside of the “mania” that is routinely derided as a category of otherness. Germany is suffering a madness, but the antidote is of course not objectivity or any of its correlates (reason, law, justice, and so on). Unsurprisingly, this does not constitute a problem that Hitler feels the need to acknowledge. Opposition to what may be considered mad is, for sure, presented in intuitive and self-evident fashion; but the outside of that madness is obscure, just as the structuring of those differences that might delimit such madness remains enigmatic. It would seem that an ambivalent relationship to mania is itself a constitutive feature of Hitlerism’s own manic phase.
3. Nachkrieg and Melancholy
In the period after the First World War, the sense of extreme national humiliation that produced the historical experience of Nachkrieg (afterwar) took the form not only of a mortifying sense of loss throughout Germany but a refusal to accept the war’s ending. Many Germans wished to deny the loss that was at the same time so powerfully felt. In “Theories of German Fascism,” Walter Benjamin argued that this tendency to continually relive the last war, to permanently inhabit its milieu, prevented Germany from accepting and capitalizing on loss—as he himself believed had happened in Russia. And yet, as Peter Osborne has argued, such seemingly backward-looking politics were not merely opposed to modernity but instead constituted precisely a form of modernism, in that they sought not so much to conserve an already lost past as to create the conditions for its realization for the first time. Reactionary modernism is therefore trapped in an intensifying predicament: Germany’s relationship to the past undergoes a further twist, since not only is the past not lost, but it has not yet happened. If post-war Germany endured Nachkrieg as if in want of an (historic) object, the shadow cast over it comes as much from the future as anywhere else.
Published in 1930, “Theories of German Fascism”—a review of Krieg und Krieger, a collection of essays edited by Ernst Jünger—is often considered to be the dialectical partner of Benjamin’s appraisal of Erich Kastner’s poetry, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” published in 1931. Here, the political significance of the left-wing intelligentsia is “exhausted by the transposition of revolutionary reflexes, insofar as they arose in the bourgeoisie, into objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be supplied for consumption.” From Expressionism to New Objectivity, Benjamin detects “comfortable arrangements” having been made in a markedly “uncomfortable situation.” These are characterized by the only thing that now remains: the “empty spaces” and “hollow forms” that express the fact of this transposition having taken place. But the shallow and vacuous products of left-wing melancholy are nevertheless commodities “whose sales crisis is already on the horizon.” The mournfulness of the left—of the “satiated man” who can feast no more on the fruits of his labors—is therefore the counterpart of Hitlerist ascendancy in the wake of Nachkrieg. It is the flip side of what is almost wholly wanting, in other words, but also another version of it.
4. “My Father Is Still a Giant!”: Trumpmania
Slavoj Žižek’s Liberal Fascisms articulates a concept of “fascist libertarianism” to describe the specific character of Trumpism and to confront what seems most paradoxical about it: the sudden swing from isolationism to interventionism, increases in state control alongside deregulation and the dismantling of government, the bizarrely perpetual reordering of political relationships—all of this adds up to a powerfully unstable mix of authoritarian egoism and libidinal destructiveness. What actually defines Trump is that he shuttles between the torn halves of contemporary political reality without feeling the need to reconcile them, just as the manic sufferer swings wildly between triumph and disaster, devastation and desperate, ungrounded delight. In such a situation, clowning as power reaches new heights as political crimes are revelled in: the sheer enjoyment of power characterizing Trumpian authoritarianism compensates for the loss or lack of an authority principle itself. For Žižek, Trump henceforth becomes a new kind of father figure, characterized by an obscene form of sovereignty capable of saying whatever it likes. The real-world chutzpah is so knowing that it can hardly be contested or disputed. Nonetheless, Žižek rightly likens Trump to Herr Benderman in Franz Kafka’s “The Judgement”: a weak father who drives his own offspring to suicide. Emerging from his darkened room like some demented hospital case, nightshirt gaping as he moves, the son is driven to exclaim: “My father is still a giant!” Of course, Trump himself plays along with this game by denying all the big threats that promise a cataclysmic future beyond him (whether that is J. D. Vance, ecological disaster, or violent social division) and by badging his own brand of power as absolutely durable. As Trump’s rambling, undisguised contradictions convey a powerful and deliberate assumption of the role of master, the entire performance teases lack only in order to repudiate its very possibility all the more decisively. Mania itself performs this same party trick: by substituting an apparently unbroken state of elation for melancholic want of an object, it ups the ante on the question of power each time of asking.
Mania is, in this precise sense, the answer par excellence to the unrelenting demands of a certain authoritarianism without authority. While mania is linked, in many people’s minds, with other emotional or psychic reactions long associated with Freud’s legacy (hysteria, for example), it is possible to trace a different connection between mania and phobia as involving psychological effects that share important affinities. What mania has in common with phobia is the prospect of relief in circumstances where authority, in fact the authority principle itself, is in abeyance. Rather like the instantaneous and usually short-lived effects of a phobic reaction, mania actively assumes its temporary nature. It lives in the moment. For Freud, a phobic reaction occurs in circumstances where authority, notably the law of the father, has gone missing. This is certainly the case for Little Hans, perhaps Freud’s best-known phobic sufferer, for whom the paternal influence is notably weak. As a consequence, the phobic subject lacks the necessary degree of prohibition vis-à-vis the (maternal) object of desire. In want of a bar, they risk a terrible drift towards psychotic experience wherein the subject-object relation itself begins to collapse. In these circumstances, phobic objects stand in, provoking recoil and therefore simulating the effects of a certain separation that partially recuperates the situation. In the political realm, it is possible to suggest that Trumpism is a telling example of the phobic paradigm, Trump himself emerging as a faux substitute, a spectacular shock replacement for the lack of authority which he also manifestly represents. Trumpism’s dual objective of dismantling systems responsible for the regulation of manifold desires and then performing another experience of authority in their wake recalls Benito Mussolini’s version of fascism as pure thought and action ungrounded by abstract principle, based on a conception of life that is intuitive and world creating, not dutiful in any sense. The blatant chaos of reason, exercised with a jubilant disregard that is also self-regard; the constantly unstable bartering of norms, performed on the international stage by the farce of global tariffs; the revelry of smash-and-grab politics and the constant mockery of law driven to the point of sheer, repetitive tedium—all of this suggests a manic response, a manic crisis, that nevertheless comes every time with a certain phobic recoil. But this recoil is one that—in the Freudian sense of a phobia—does not deplete so much as it props up, reinvests an underlying set of power relations. Until the next time.
The Trumpist reincarnation of the phobic paradigm therefore risks an experience of desire that points towards the onset of psychosis, arrested only by recurrent moments of a performative legitimacy backed by expressions of sheer power that form the counterpart as much as the antidote to the psychotic risk that Trumpist highwire-ism persistently runs. If the onset of phobia may be likened to that of mania, providing the prospect of relief through an excitation that converts an anxious malaise into something strangely uplifting or enlivening, it may be possible to account for Trumpmania through a certain psychoanalytic reading: once again, the malaise in question is grief in want of an object. Grief in want of an object is how Benjamin diagnosed the mentality of the German people after the First World War: they knew they had lost, loss consumed them, even though denial was central to that same knowledge and experience; they did not know—could not know—what they lacked. The “change round” from melancholy to mania evoked by Freud in The Ego and the Id provides a fitting description:
If we turn to melancholia . . . , we find that the excessively strong super-ego which has obtained a hold on consciousness rages against the ego with merciless violence . . . the destructive component had entrenched itself in the super-ego and turned against the ego. What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change round into mania.
Mania represents an ambiguous and unsettling experience of the other—whether because, as an opaque expression of protest (aimed at the true if obscured cause of suffering, for example a cruel or unloving parent or spouse) it manifests an internalized form of alienation; or whether since its euphoria, as the alleviation of melancholy, is always the dislocated reaction to a terrible enigma. Mania is necessarily an uncomfortable type of excitation, often split between triumph and rage, at once intensely felt and yet unable to achieve a sense of ownness (which, in the political realm, might translate in terms of ideas of restorative and cleansing unification, a sense of restitution or making whole again). It threatens precisely because it can never achieve itself—whether as a form of power or resistance—except by a destructiveness whose capacity remains as obscure as the forces governing the transition from melancholia to mania in the first place. Mania, to put it bluntly, can never be at home with its own narcissism. If this makes fascist types of manic aggression even more dangerous, it also makes manic protest more potent, more inextricable than one might at first imagine. The prospect of revolt is part of it, comes with it, even if mania’s obscure economy is treacherous in the extreme.
