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Claudia Leeb’s important essay, ‘Castration anxiety, COVID-19 and the extremist right’ (2021), contributes to our growing understanding of the logics of right-wing populism and conspiracy theories, here as exemplified by former US President Donald Trump’s and Austrian politician Norbert Hofer’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both Trump and Hofer have portrayed themselves as more powerful than the virus and the virus as nothing to fear, encouraging their followers to disregard public health measures as they are unnecessary and emasculating. Leeb draws on Theodor Adorno’s 1967 lecture, Aspekte des Neuen Rechtsradikalismus (Aspects of New Right Extremism; republished in 2019), for a psychoanalytic account of the castration anxieties that COVID-19 has provoked. Closer to Lacan’s rather than Freud’s account, castration here means being metaphorically ‘cut down to size’, diminished, a subject with a hole at its centre that, having entered the symbolic realm, will always suffer from a lack and incessant but elusive desire for wholeness. Anyone who has entered into the Symbolic, trading away presence for representation is, as Calvin Thomas puts it, suffering from ‘symbolic castration,’ which ‘is for Lacan the universal condition of anyone who speaks’ (Thomas, 2019: 134). With Adorno, Leeb sees castration further as a matter of capitalism’s ‘mutilating conditions’, which, with the pandemic, have led to castration anxieties over economic precarity, interpersonal isolation and personal bodily health; as well as how COVID-19 has left many people vulnerable to the lure of the culture industry, especially through the internet, leading to diminished critical thinking and heightened vulnerability to being captured by far right extremism.
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Adorno, T.W. (2019) Aspekte des Neuen Rechtsradikalismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.
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Johanssen, J. (2020) Social media and coronavirus: Paranoid-schizoid technology and pandemic?, Human Arenas, https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-020-00162-2.
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Leeb, C. (2021) Castration anxiety, COVID-19 and the extremist right, Global Discourse, vol 11, no 3: 387–403. doi: 10.1332/204378921X16154801060273
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Thomas, C. (2019) Adventures In Theory: A Compact Anthology, New York: Bloomsbury.
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Vanheule, S. (2016) Capitalist discourse, subjectivity and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Frontiers in Psychology, 7: 1948, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01948.
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