Democracy is accompanied by a series of master signifiers that have made it become fixed, robust and a reality in the world. And it is precisely by questioning these signifiers that it weaves its opposition. The first is FUTURE. Believing in the future is of Them. It clearly states that the future will be of Them or the people will awaken, but because it will break with the future. Rather it places the people in the present. It is a gamble. He explains that he chooses to speak of the people - despite the fact that in the nineties it was already a somewhat obsolete term - because he wants to oppose it to that of MAN and PROJECT, which are two very strong terms of democracy. His is an intentional choice, an action based on language. He says: "I don't believe in the goal, but I do speak about the goal". The wounds caused by capitalism affect us all equally. There is no difference between a prostitute, a drug addict, a worker or oneself. I am the other.

He will point out that the fundamental function of democracy is to administer death, and that is to convert time into accountants, into money, into revenue. In this proposition, one can very well perceive an operation of progressive and silent assassination of desire. Life is completely administered, divided into work time and leisure time, which is exactly the same thing, because everything is geared towards consumption. So everything is work and it is work for nothing, which must be of no use and which above all is made to exterminate desire. Democracy is at the service of the creation of needs. It is therefore a great entelechy around the nothingness that fills everything, that leaves no place empty. On the contrary, it would seem that the void has been displaced to the most intimate experience of subjectivity. At the same time, democracy proposes a delirious strengthening of the ego. A strong, fortified and, above all, personal ego. Narcissism is at home. Augustine says: "Man is the Individual perfectly constituted... Populations wholly made up of a certain number of Personal Individuals that can be counted... State and Capital aspire to that in statistics by giving support to unity and individuality". All this has deep resonances with the hygienist ideologies of self-help, CBT, DSM etc.

I consider this point to be fundamental, since we would have to distinguish that the wager for singularity that psychoanalysis makes, as put forward by Lacan, is precisely in radical opposition to this democratic ideal. Singularity is based on desire, desire is profound alienation, and consists in making this emptiness operative. In the text he makes this dimension of singularity appear articulated to his idea of the people. The people as distinct from the mass of personal individualities, the people as "that in which I am not who I am", thus accentuating the experience of subjective division as a search engine generating a void that pierces so much democratic propaganda about the self, security and happiness. I find it interesting to locate the subjective division precisely there, in the people, since we can think that for them this singularity of each one of us is articulated in a social commitment. It is by taking charge of our division, even loving it, that we can generate the strength of the people, or at least that is how I read his words. I consider that his position is also that of desire for psychoanalysis, since taking charge of it necessarily implies a social commitment. It is the fiction of the barrier between the subject and the social that shows the knot of the sinthome, since the most radical singularity is the social bond.

Agustín tells us about his own, his singularity, which rejects the future, social happiness, resignation and cynicism. In his case it is the activism of the contra. That is why I think that, as he puts it, the struggle to preserve desire as the motor of human singularity is necessarily located against Democracy.

I recommend this fresh read, full of ideas that once slammed me as it does its audience. It also shows something of the effects on subjectivity, how 20 years ago, young people, myself included, were asking questions, searching, faced with the mission of dismantling a scenario that still promulgated peace and social happiness. Today the scenario is different. The lie is unveiled, the monster shows its guts. Anguish roams unabashedly at large, absent of symptoms to deal with it. But perhaps his example, that of a man who never gave in to his desire, never gave up thinking bravely, will provide some clues, some points of reference, to continue dancing to death and the unstoppable thrust of human devastation. Psychoanalysis is in that, this Forum is an example.

Irene Domínguez

https://colochosblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/contra-la-democracia-de-agustin-garcia-calvo/