Volume 16

Myths between Freud and Lacan: an Investigation of Bolsonaro’s Ideological Rise

30 July 202430 July 2024By Rafael Fernandez

Rodrigo Gonsalves
Universidade de São Paulo

Volume 16, 2024

Introduction

In recent times, Brazilian politics has been dangerously flirting with repeating its own past: the reestablishment of a renewed military dictatorship. In the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections, a far-right populist was democratically elected. The 2018 Brazilian presidential elections saw a dramatic rise in far-right populist rhetoric. Among the many peculiar elements about this election, two deserve further investigation. The first concerns how the running candidate at that time, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, attempted to associate his image with a mythical past (one which never factually took place). The second concerns the hyper-identification of Bolsonaro’s middle name “Messias” (Messiah) with the neo-Pentecostal movement which deeply supports him (composed significantly by “structural riffraff”—a concept used by Brand Arenari—of the Brazilian population). 

The present essay develops a philosophical investigation based on critical theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to sustain its hypothesis concerning Brazil’s political situation. It does not propose to sustain a sociological investigation, but a criticophilosophical one. The method of short-circuiting critical theory and psychoanalysis used in this essay derives from the methodological strategy of philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hebert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin who were part of (or are associated with) the Frankfurt School1 and who consolidated such methodology to the field of philosophy. Through this methodological scope the present text approaches Bolsonaro as a psychoanalytic symptom. Which means it is a symptom which requires the subsequent question: a symptom of what, precisely? The psychoanalytic logic of investigating symptoms allows the question to be explored under a different perspective, to be listened to from a different tone. Freud’s definition of psychoanalytic symptoms diverges from the medical discursivity of his time; symptoms for Freud are a manifestation of suffering which reaches the surface deriving from an unconscious logic, propelling individuals to face their desires and contradictions instead of denying them. The present article does not transpose the psychoanalytic clinic to the social nor the political, which would be a rather problematic approach. What it does is to benefit from some psychoanalytic concepts and its logic of symptoms in order to inform a philosophic political discussion concerning collectivity and the capture of a certain populist discourse in Brazil. This is not a paper on sociology or anthropology, although it approaches some of its discussions. The key object of the present paper is a critical philosophy discussion concerning the repetition of a known symptom in Brazil, the nostalgic feeling behind having the military in power and to shed some light on how psychoanalysis can enrich this symptomatic wish for alienation and domination. Lacan’s theorization of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real provides an insightful approach to the subjective affects which guide and compose our sense of sociability and collectivity, our relationship with the Other. Thus, the present text shows how psychoanalysis can introduce insights on how Bolsonaro’s discourse became a viable choice to be democratically elected even when he sustained a non-factual discourse on a Brazil. Such analytical insights lead toward a better understanding of the collective affects and the unconscious logic of nostalgia that allowed him to place himself as a “Messiah” or a “myth” and to be elected president through this narrative. 

Brief notes on Brazil’s military dictatorship

This section has no intention of summarizing what this brutal period of Brazil’s history meant. It only aims to bring forward elements of its trajectory in order to shed some light on the main discussion of the present article: the symbolic relevance of myths and their weaponization in politics. The military dictatorship in Brazil ended but its consequences never ceased to operate within the country’s symbolic fabric. There is a certain nostalgia which benefits from an imaginary composition of Brazil’s past which has a direct connection to the lack of social memory concerning this period. Basically, the lack of clarity of what actually took place pokes holes into a social narrative about the horrors that took place. Brazil’s military dictatorship occurred from 1964 to 1985, a period filled with terrifying violent assaults against civilians, uncountable deaths, persecutions, tortures, and numerous cases of corruption. For the obvious reason of maintaining power over the State, the military had no interest to investigate or to cast any doubt about itself as an institution or even less to perform any kind of self-criticism about its structural abuse of violence or systematic killings of insurgents and dissidents. Far from it, the military persisted in their monopoly of violence over civilians against the possibility thar any other form of social organization rose to power. The military dictatorship lasted a little over two decades, but it took around 29 years for the public to gain access to the official documents and dispute the narrative defended. The first official investigation in Brazil about the military dictatorship (which was facilitated by the Workers Party) came from “The National Truth Committee.” After four years of investigative research, the committee released in 2014 three dossiers detailing the covering up of strategies used by the military. It portrayed their methods for targeting dissidents, and the infiltration tactics used to kidnap and disappear those who opposed the regime. The dossiers also proved that 20,000 people were tortured by the regime, and confirmed the identity of 434 murder victims, who were considered “missing” until that document was released.2 Even after the investigation, many more victims are still considered “missing,” and many official documents of that period are still protected by the military. Further during the dictatorship, around 8,300 native Brazilians were killed by the military (CNV 2014).3 The countless atrocities of the military dictatorship in Brazil were supposed to be kept dead and buried (and most of it still are),4 but the National Truth Committee managed to reveal the tip of this iceberg of horrors. It is relevant to remember that Brazil’s NTC was one of the last ones established amongst other Latin American countries. 

After immense popular struggle and countless examples of organized resistance, Brazil finally managed to go through a process of (re)democratization in 1985. As Timothy Power  emphasizes: “For twenty years, Brazilians had been governed by the leaders of three factions of opposition to military rule: first the intellectual wing, then the social movement wing, and finally the armed resistance” (“The Brazilian Military Regime of 1964-1985,” 14). Nonetheless, Power’s argument is even more poignant, since he denounces how, on a closer inspection of the macro political Brazilian scenario, Brazil’s current democracy is still “profoundlyshaped by legacies of military rule” (14).5 

Sharing a similar diagnosis but with a different prognosis, the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes investigates the logic of exception,6 displayed in the operations of “vanishing” individuals, introduced by the military dictatorship. Going through a chronologically excruciating critical narrative of the barbaric historic events of the dictatorship, Arantes poses a fundamental question concerning the implications of the “day after” the dictatorship “ended”: “What is there to come? A Brazilian style negationism?” (“1964, o ano que não terminou,” 209, my italics). Arantes then denounces how the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, which aimed to reset the basis of commonwealth and the primary functions of the redemocratization,7 was sustaining, already in its new foundations, the “militarization of public safety” (213). In other words, the very “normalization” of such militarization integrated the logic of exception into the roots of Brazil’s redemocratization. With a Benjaminian clarity in dealing with politics, Arantes “anticipated” (in a radically non-mystical and non-speculative sense of the term) the negationism trend in Brazil, not as a speculative “peek” into the future, but as a sober examination of the material conditions and legal facilitations the military built for themselves during the past dictatorship. Thus, 1964 or “the year that never ends,” as Arantes’ argues, translates a certain Freudian uncanniness of reality itself (210) that evokes a tension to be disputed—over and over—against the resentment of those who lost, since “the nation needed to be protected against itself” (210).8 There is a “civil-military block which hasn’t been undone…” (216) and the “democratic” experience after redemocratization is a myth, a product of the terror itself that “came from the dictatorship: the consecration of business logic as the administrative practice of the public sector” (221). Arantes’ sums up his argument by saying that, more than residual pathologies, what remains from the dictatorship after the renormalization of political violence is actually the discovery of its new purpose: “the permanent State of economical emergency” (228).     

According to the philosopher Vladimir Safatle, the particular violence that aims at symbolic obliteration is far more brutal than physical violence itself (“Do uso da violência contra o estado ilegal,” 238).  It is the “violence of the imposition of the disappearance of the name” (238),9 which erases each and every trace of what took place during the dictatorship. This is how Brazil “(…) accomplished the most monstrous and spurious prophecy of all. The prophecy of violence without trauma” (240). Safatle, here, is in perfect agreement with Arantes (as previously argued) on the implications of the logic of exceptionality established during the dictatorship. But Safatle adds how, in Brazil, there lies a “discrete symptom of a profound totalitarian tendency which our society never fully got rid of” (240), and how this specific “discrete symptom” could end up becoming our ruin (which was indeed the case, if we consider the solidification of the far-right in Brazil). 

Following Safatle, the systematic amnesia installed in the country was usually consolidated by two main contradictory arguments. First, according to the official version, “there were no torture or killings in Brazil as a systematic policy of State’s security” (“Do uso da violência contra o estado ilegal,” 241). On the other hand, if “there were torture and killings, [it is because] we were at war against the ‘terrorists’… who wanted to transform the country in a branch of international Communism” (242). While the first is a bluntly negationist perspective, the second is a forgery, a historical revisionism that mistakes violence with counter-violence, as Safatle sustains (242). Both arguments become legally noticeable in Brazil, where the Law of Amnesty is maneuvered in order to cover up crimes against humanity committed by the military during the dictatorship. The logic goes as follows: if this law were to be used against the military, it should also be applied to the “terrorists” (243). This logic was defended by Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice around 1979, and has had no significant transformation until today. And, as Safatle makes fairly clear, the right to go against (with organized armed revolts) an illegal State, orchestrated and effectuated by a military coup, is not recognized. One must also acknowledge that there was no armed resistance in Brazil prior to the 1964 military coup (248). Safatle shows how the systematic effort to reinforce collective amnesia of the terrors of military dictatorship through negationism (250), the production of discrete symptoms, and calling this the “consolidation of democratic normality,” is nothing short of obscene (251). What is more, the echoes and ripples from 1964 are still very much present in Brazil, indicating some fundamental points concerning the local political topos, and thus allowing for a more precise investigation of Brazil’s more recent situation.10 The crucial elements highlighted here, concerning the discrete symptom (240), the Freudian uncanniness of reality (Arantes, “1964, o ano que não terminou,” 210), and the negationism presented by both, Arantes and Safatle, are key concepts that compose the Brazilian political scenario. Thus, taking a closer look at them should help give an insight into the political scenario that elected Bolsonaro and the more recent advance of the far-right. 

A Marxist perspective on Brazil’s recent situation 

Fast Forward to 2016. After a different kind of coup, now a political one that impeached Dilma Rousseff’s (Power), her vice-president, Michel Temer, from the PMDB (a right-center political party), assumed the presidency. As president, Temer opposed the claims of the recent coup, orchestrated against the Worker’s Party,11 and defended the government and the Senate for removing Rousseff’s out of office.12 This scenario of political instability was followed by an increase of economic impoverishment. Meanwhile, a more insidious character was gaining popularity amongst Brazilians: Jair Bolsonaro. It is important to remember that Brazil held the 2018 presidential election under a highly peculiar political scenario, where direct and indirect influences participated in this grab for power, changing the variables and exploring old and new “means” to do so. First, the former president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (also known as Lula), was convicted and imprisoned through a biased trial (which has now been reversed), not allowing him to run for the presidency, as the preliminaries for candidates had indicated he would in 2018. Second, Brazil was among the more than 60 countries used as guinea pigs for Cambridge Analytica’s soft power and weaponization of technology experiment (Cadwalladr).13 With these means as variables in mind, a Marxist approach proves useful to examine how such tools were used in the montage orchestrated by Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign for the presidency. 

It is possible to consider Brazil as a more recent example of the repetition described by Marx in his Eighteenth of Brumaire to Louis Bonaparte. This is where Marx famously discusses Hegel’s claim that history always repeats itself, saying that he forgot to add: first as tragedy then as farce.14 Marx carefully emphasizes how this repetition is carried out by two different moments in French history (which Slavoj Žižek described as a proper symptomatic repetition). For Marx, 1793 France was “embodied” in 1848 France as a caricature of its own past, but not without pervasive consequences. Marx understands that such “past” never actually took place; this is a past that never was. Or as Marx puts it: 

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content—here the content goes beyond the phrase

(The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 6) 

Thus, Marx describes the mobilization of known affects, motifs, and memories of a population as subjective elements which can be capturable and manipulated in the class struggle. Marx emphasizes the further pervasive political risk of such disguised “novelties,” which “surface” symbolically charged as repetitions of the past in the present. In a way, Marx advocates for the necessity to “exorcize” the ghosts of the past in order to invent another future. Such, “exorcism” means subsuming the past through a proper dialectic procedure towards the condition of possibility of something new in the political sphere. Considering Marx’s argument on repetition in its farcical rendition, the Marxist philosopher Kojin Karatani offers an interesting interpretation (The Structure of world history, 176). For Karatani, Marx did not fail to understand the State’s machinery and the class division in its struggles participating in such a situation. According to Karatani, Marx “anticipates” Freud, showing how “dreams” could act as a motivator and a significant element for subjectivization. In short, Karatani defends how a certain “dream-like” idea of the Nation had a formidable impact in the unconscious of the French classes instead of in their own interests. Such an argument emphasizes an element usually missing from (orthodox) Marxist analyses of political situations like the one in Brazil.    

One can say that the 2018 destabilization of (an already remarkably fragile) Brazilian democracy was somewhat counting on the ghosts of its past. To put in bluntly, the orchestration behind the removal of the Worker’s Party signals the constant class war, which is permanently fought—but only by one of its sides, as Mark Fisher would have added (Capitalist Realism, 29). The efforts to normalize the crimes committed during Brazil’s military dictatorship are met with the strategic efforts of the military (still up to this date) to avoid any kind of consequence or any kind of symbolic recognition for such crimes. As Safatle, in a Žižekian-Lacanian vein puts it: this is the second death of those already dead (“Do uso da violência contra o estado ilegal,” 252). Without any public recognition that could allow for a re-signification of those who died by the hands of the military in the dictatorship, any effort of reintegration of those deaths into a collective memory cannot be allowed (252). Here is where the “piling up” of legal exceptions on top of one another, or as Safatle puts it, “the diminishment of legality to its level of appearances” (251), functions, fostering the amnesiac state of normalcy in the population. Now, the “dream-like” idea of the Nation that lurks in the Brazilian’ unconscious, together with Arantes’s remark on the uncanniness15 of reality (“1964, o ano que não terminou,” 212), become much clearer. Thus, a radical Marxist perspective, as seen above, can introduce a specific look behind the tactics assumed by the Bolsonaro family16 in their run for power in Brazil. In retrospect, one can also show how the political scenario of the 2018 presidential elections in Brazil was being “schematized” and subjected to the influence17 of the intensification of international neo-imperialist interests (The Structure of world history, 189) since the 2016’s impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (Power), which spearheaded the organization of the far-right in the country. 

Since we have established the basis of our analysis, now we can discuss the particular element introduced by this article through the short-circuit between Freud and Lacan: Jair Bolsonaro’s self-slogan understood as a myth (Brum),18 utilized during his campaign for the presidency.    

Group formations in Freud and the role of myths for psychoanalysis: a brief description

Freud’s (1990) analysis of group formations and its effects over individuals gains another dimension once we remind ourselves of the context in which it was developed. Since 1919, Germany’s political scenario presented far-right movements and inclinations, noticeable manifestations of the solidification of Nazi group formations and narratives. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud investigates two artificial group formations (i.e. the Church and the army), where individuals are bound by libidinal ties to a leader and to other members of the group (44). Such elements are still valuable to comprehend the materiality of group formation and the role of identification in sociability, especially considering the sense of belonging and self-recognition under these situations. If we approach Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of group formations to the Brazilian context of recent years, it becomes clear how Bolsonaro meticulously built his image as an imaginary solution to social issues he himself never had the intention of fixing.19 

Freud’s investigation reveals how a neurotic angst of abandonment and discontent compels individuals to integrate and form groups as a protective measure against feeling unloved and the fear of death. For Freud, the logic of living in society has a lot to do with this. The subjective process of socialization results from the repression and renunciation of immediate satisfaction in order to be with others. This is a way of not being fully subjected to the fear against the other who can harm me and the complete discontent caused by nature. Nonetheless, there is a subjective price to pay in order to integrate yourself, under neurotic terms, to this organization of social reality. The symbolic absorption of laws in the name of imaginary promises of social protection comes with the renunciation and repression of our drives. More specifically, Freud defends how libidinal investments and social recognition operate in our process of collectivity, sustaining relationships of power and control. Hypothetically, when a collective establishes itself around a leader, those who submit themselves will renounce a fraction of their autonomy for the guidance of this person in charge. This specific process of alienation is ambiguous because the renunciation of your full autonomy can bring some sort of relief, but it also comes with a denying of the entirety of the decisions impacting our own existence, thus blindsiding us about ourselves on some level. While on a micro-scale this example is self-evident, things get much more complicated under highly complex societies and with the multiplicity of scenarios that integrate our subjectivity. The political scenarios of our contemporary western democracies and the accelerated modes of production and circulation of capitalist society under financialized capitalism have absorbed such unconscious mechanisms of our collectivity and used this unconscious logic of collectivity organization against us. The specificity of these operations concerns the unconscious level, while the conditions of possibility of collective desire are hijacked by the interests of those in power and turned against any alternative form of social organization—as Mark Fisher defended in his final lectures. Freud’s interpretation allows us to conceive how father-like figures shepherding a herd sustain a vertical guidance which prevents ontological doubts that would lead to anguish. In Brazil, the domination through a preacher-like discourse at the social level dictates not the “what” but the “how” groups should desire at the political level, perfecting the operations of alienation and sustaining it at its worst. Thus, the manipulation of masses for the benefit of its leader can be understood through this Freudian interpretation.

Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1955) introduces a relationship of mastery and bondage between the primordial father and his sons to highlight the fundamental operations of domination and subservience to the Law. The mythical dimension of the primordial Father in Freud’s anthropological examination separates those who have access to satisfaction and those who do not, while presenting a dialectical struggle to conquer and sustain positions of power. For Freud, the primordial father holds the point of exception by not experiencing lack and having access to all possible sexual satisfaction. This is the point of exception which, in a way, establishes law itself and constitutively restricts his sons. The Freudian argument concerning the neurotic dimension of prohibitions and the many modes of implications and reactions to them derives from this formulation. The primordial father of the herd is an ambiguous figure, simultaneously feared and worshiped. According to Freud, the murder of the father by his sons is a collective accomplishment beyond any individual capabilities. It is a collective effort of shared hate against repression. The totemic meal of the father is a symbolic act of absorption of the father’s powers, after which the sons share the guilt. Instead of any son managing to assume the father’s position, this position is forever lost. The mythical narrative which takes place after this act includes a reactive consolidation of power, lack, and guilt, rising from a purportedly recently found homogenous position between the sons. Such a presupposition of equality against the asymmetric relationship with the father fosters a persisting dispute amongst them for that position.   

Freud’s formulation of the mythical domain is beneficial for the psychoanalytical understanding of the imaginary and symbolic elements within collective relationships of power and libidinal investment of ideals. His analyses explain a variety of phenomena, such as the foundation of prohibitions and laws, transgression and violence, and the dialectics between drives and historical moments, through processes of social obedience, mass formation, the fear of the masses against their leaders, the logic of domination through the idealized father-life figure, as well as the necessity such leaders and father figures have to use any discursive strategy available to sustain their image. The mythical power sustained by the primordial father is the unreachable position sustained under a dialectics of domination in social collectivity.20 The Lacanian approach to myths (influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss’ structuralist analysis) reads the formation of myths under the logical system of a giving society. Basically, when the sons murdered the father for power and control over women, this symbolic guilt shared amongst the siblings did not dissolve the dead father. Instead, it gave him much more power through the imaginary return of the repressed. The “ghostly” dimension of the introjection of the dead father as a law made his control much more intense than when he was alive.

From the standpoint of these psychoanalytic formulations, Brazil’s political scene (which has been experiencing “political” uprisings ever since 2012) went through—between 2016 and 2018—a deconstruction without philosophical criticism. Much like the quintessential point of a psychoanalytic process is to cease its necessity for the person who’s suffering, to find a psychoanalytic cure can mean to surpass the necessity of the process of analysis itself. In this sense, the point of deconstruction must be to deconstruct itself as a philosophical strategy; it must be radical enough to do so. Otherwise, there will always be a leftover which will symptomatically repeat itself and ghostly appear to haunt us. 

Beyond theoretical concerns, the historical “accident” of Bolsonaro’s election has deeper political implications, especially since his election was not an accident but rather a symptom of Brazil’s return of the repressed. The military dictatorship was not fully elaborated under a social collective narrative and there are imaginary gaps and narrative roles from where leftovers from the horrors are obliterated by a normalized feeling of nostalgia that lurks over the present. The lack of social elaboration of the horrors from the past and the impunity of the perpetrators sustained the possibility of renormalizing a troubling narrative about what actually took place under the military dictatorship. Bolsonaro’s discourse, which is nothing but a typical authoritarian discourse, benefited from the destabilized political situation to retrieve a sense of pride for the perpetrators of the military dictatorship. Bolsonaro tirelessly advertised himself as the one who could solve corruption in Brazilian politics (at the time, the main popular media outlets were profusely disseminating news against the Workers Party Partido dos Trabalhadores], associating them with corruption). However, he was not “selling” the promise of a future. Instead, Bolsonaro was, actually, purposefully instigating the forgetfulness of the terrors of dictatorship itself. Bolsonaro’s discourse strategically legitimizes a false memory of the period of dictatorship. He tapped into symptomatic normalcy and performed relativism as its central strategy for politics. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro promoted the narrative that a drug called “hidroxicloroquina” could cure and protect the people. This led a vast majority of Brazil’s population to go against the vaccines. Brazil had around 702,116 deaths of covid-19 and Bolsonaro’s downplaying the pandemic and spreading of lies about treatment have a direct impact over this number. This example seems to prove the troubling consequences of relativizing knowledge as just another narrative in order to sustain political power. But before we all-too-quickly point fingers at the people as das Volk, it is crucial to remind ourselves of Sylvain Lazarus’ fundamental premise that “people think (les gens pensent) and that thought is a relation of the real” (Anthropology of the Name, 48). What is terrible to admit, but one could concede, is that, behind Bolsonaro’s campaign of self-proclamation as a living myth, lies the brutal reality of him advertising himself as a parody of himself, a forgery, a myth, a transparent and raw cynic assuming and declaring his own deceitfulness. Bolsonaro marketed his middle name “Messias” (Messiah), mixing thus religious discursivity with the ideological promise of moralizing the country. This is a narrative of power that suggests a nostalgic past where things were much better, where liberties were not chaotic and order was in place. This is actually an ode to the military dictatorship but one which never actually happened or took place. Although the effectiveness of this narrative derives from an unconscious fantasy of a leader who can make everything ordered and peaceful, this is a completely false image. The past that Bolsonaro advocates never actually happened. Nevertheless, he knows that it is about being able to erase the narrative of the past or substituting it with a new one—this is the danger of Bolsonaro’s political narrative. Could Bolsonaro’s honest openness about his atrocious positions be what actually captured people’s affects? Or, perhaps, by calling himself a “myth” and assuming this empty place, the position of a father-figure of authority against the chaos (whatever that could mean for a more conservative perspective of reality) what Bolsonaro did was invoking people’s (most obscure) process of subjectivization21 (Badiou Theory of the Subject), thus filling a lack that people could understand how they see fit. What is certain is that Bolsonaro’s self-proclamation as a myth worked perfectly as a dog’s whistle for his political base, the religious neo-Pentecostals (Gonsalves, Dunker, Estevão) who, even today, after the many national and international scandals and absurd policies and postures, still sustain his approval ratings.   

Here is where Freud’s analysis of myth can provide critical insights into the unconscious affects mobilizing collective formations of obscure subjects, i.e., of subjects holding on to reality under one specific meaning and not sustaining the conditions of possibility for transformation and multiplicity. Freudian psychoanalysis can thus potentially provide a transformative passage from this obscurity to the fidelity of desire, providing steps toward radical emancipation against domination. When Safatle discusses the liquidation of identification through the psychoanalytic process, he emphasizes something revolutionary in terms of a transformation that is not detached from subjectivity, but which seriously radicalizes the otherness (identificatory traits that glue groups together) that lies within us, enhancing the singularity of desire (Safatle “Lacan, revolução e liquidação da transferência,” 222). This dimension of transformation is crucial to consider what it means to go against domination and the disciplinary brutal narratives present in our reality.  

Lacan, psychoanalysis and myths

This section will briefly bring forward Lacan’s return to Freud’s understanding of myths and some aspects of his contribution to this subject without losing sight of our discussion of the Brazilian political situation. Throughout Freud’s oeuvre, there are a few myths, but as Žižek neatly summarizes, “when we talk about myths in psychoanalysis, we are in fact talking about one myth, the Oedipus myth—all the other Freudian myths (the myth of the primordial father, Freud’s version of the Moses myth) are variations of it, albeit necessary ones” (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 9). A more careful analysis of such “necessity” shows the basic double role of this myth in psychoanalysis,22 together with its function as a discourse that refers back to interchangeable symbolic positions, and as the fundamental logic of a structural agency. 

In his fourth seminar, The Object Relation, Lacan explores the notion of myth, not to describe it as a total system that overcomes reality, nor in order to declare that psychoanalytic perspective is superior to other fields, but to investigate the limits of psychoanalysis itself. He explains that 

What is called myth, whether it’s religious or folkloric, at whichever stage of its passing down it might be taken, is something that presents as a sort of narrative. Many different things may be said about this narrative and various structural aspects may be taken up. For example, it may be said to be a-temporal. One might also try to define its structure with respect to the sites it defines. One can take it in its literary form, which quite strikingly shares some kinship with poetic creation while at the same time being very distinct from it, in the sense that myth is linked to certain constants that are absolutely not submitted to subjective invention. It is also something that would allow us at least to indicate the problems it poses.

(245)

This is where Lacan famously affirms that “[t]he structural necessity brought forth by any expression of truth is precisely a structure that is the same as that of fiction. Truth has a structure, so to speak, of fiction” (The Object Relation, 245). He strongly relies on a structural perspective of myths, which he derives from Claude Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, who himself was inspired by Freud’s analysis of myth. Lacan, who was committed to the Freudian event of the unconscious (i.e., how the unconscious is not only a part of our lives, but how it also subjects our egos and questions our prior rationalist perspective over reality), investigated the mythemes (system of myths present in a giving society) by being attentive to the double trait of myths already present in Freud. Lacan notices how “myth has a fictive character but that in itself this fiction harbors a stability which means that it is scarcely malleable to any modification that might be brought to it” (245). Thus, there is a viability to the modifications that suggest the notion of a structure, and this fiction simultaneously holds a singular relation to truth23 for the (unconscious) subject. 

A psychoanalytically-informed investigation into Bolsonaro’s presidency must certainly try to identify Bolsonaro as a symptom,24 but a symptom of what? Understanding Brazil’s past military dictatorship and the formation of discrete symptoms (The Object Relation, 240) enables us to approach Lacan’s maxim according to which, what is not symbolically elaborated returns in the Real. We can see how, in the Brazilian case, this turned out for the worst. The Freudian uncanniness of reality, the unfamiliar familiarity, always points toward a double implication: on the one hand there is angst and on the other a fantasy which requires a dissolution. The psychoanalytic notion of the uncanny indicates that there is something lurking and invading our imaginary-symbolic reality as a remainder from the past which has not been fully subsumed. Perhaps, in Brazil, the repression of the traumatic violence of the dictatorship, which had no possibility to be symbolically re-signified under different terms, built the foundation of a troubling normalcy molded by negationism (Arantes “1964, o ano que não terminou,”  210) (Safatle “Do uso da violência contra o estado ilegal,” 242). For Dunker, Freud’s death drive (and its social representation, namely, discontent [unbehagen]) is what ties psychic aggression to violence. Or, in other words, that which lacks imaginary-symbolic resources turns into a brutal experience of the Real which invades reality itself. This brutality is endorsed by Bolsonaro’s discourse when he mobilizes his followers to be violent, providing social consent to become intolerant against minorities and the possibility of difference. Dunker asserts that, “(…) Jair Bolsonaro’s reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic was always related to trauma. Be it in relation to the trauma of the military dictatorship with which Bolsonaro has a transparent identification, to the trauma represented by Lula’s government, or to the dangerous return of communism, we are under the logic of repetition without elaboration” (Lacan e a Democracia, 102). As he explains, 

[t]o deny is more than wanting to destroy, not less. This means that destructivity is an incomplete or precarious form of negation… Much like clinical negation is solved by the qualitative deepening of that very own negation, which is not a simple inversion into an affirmation, political negationism concerns finding a position in which its own insufficiency is actualized in the context of the operation of negation and which comes with the appearance of reactive affirmation. This is why the negationist suffers from the very evil that he pretends to eradicate.    

(109)

Dunker also emphasizes that psychoanalysis is one of very few fields of study which dedicated attention to “the human passion for ignorance, alienation, and resistance against emancipation” (Lacan e a Democracia, 110). For the negationists, the strategy of establishing social bonds is an alternative to facing the intricacies and contradictory dynamics of reality, or perhaps, even  an attempt to delegate such impasses towards the collective. Nonetheless, this effort produces the reactive affirmation that frames (imaginary-symbolic) reality in a way that can easily be turned into a political narrative. Bolsonaro’s violent discourse took this route, perhaps as a way to violently alleviate aggression through a symbolically poor response to the trauma of the military dictatorship. Bolsonaro’s socially cultivated hype as a myth embodies this symptomatic rendition of the terrors of the military dictatorship. His discourse is ultimately nothing but the result of not dealing collectively with this trauma.   

Final consideration

This article presents a discussion of myths to examine the Brazilian case and the events that led to Bolsonaro’s election as president. Bolsonaro’s nonsensical discursivity is a dog whistle directed towards his crowd, and the administration of denial as a form of violence seems to be his strategy. By considering these tensions from a psychoanalytic perspective, the present article allows for an understanding of how the signifier “myth” can be hijacked and weaponized, in order to destabilize and sustain a position in the class struggle against people—showing how fascism can still be a symptom of contemporary democracies in the pursuit of control of the people through fear. Additionally, this article shows how the symptomatic repetition of the terrors of the past can linger in the social fabric of a present society as a reminder, neither symbolically elaborated nor collectively mourned. These narrative holes of the social composition of collective memories can come back to haunt the present—something crystal clear in the Brazilian case. The absurdity of a presidential candidate who defends the horrors of the dictatorship signals the numbness and brutishness of a vast part of the population who suffers so much that a discourse such as this appeals to their sensibilities. The Workers Party could not build structural transformations deep enough to guarantee a better social security to its people, and those who benefited from some of the changes, formed a lower middle class that was still unsatisfied. The symptomatic “openness” of how Bolsonaro talks about the dictatorship should catch everyone’s attention—it is an unheimlich perverse voice of the past lingering in reality itself—a voice of the tortured ghosts from the horrors of our past, of those who were not recognized as victims of the dictatorship. Finally, the article explores how the collective necessity of symbolical elaboration of the traumas left from the military dictatorship in Brazil requires immediate response. The far-right ideology is cultivated through group formations based on the identificatory traits with a leader through the rendition of a moralist understanding of the past. Nevertheless, this past never took place. It never actually happened. This article shows how the discourse of relativism of facts sustains a poor social symbolic register, making traumas from the past (which can produce ideological fantasies), repeat themselves. 

Notes

  1. The Frankfurt School was founded by Carl Grünberg in 1923 with the key objective of revisiting Karl Marx writings to the impasses of their time. ↩︎
  2. Paulo Arantes (207) in 1964, o ano que não terminou [1964, the year which never ends] (not translated to English) describes the strategic legal limbo operated by the military in order to structure persecutiopon, imprisonment, and execution of dissidents, e.g. arresting dissidents as bank robbers. But Arantes’ key argument concerns how a switch of the logic of exception was established after 1964 when the state held operations to “vanish” people, and how such logic still persists even today.    ↩︎
  3. The National Truth Committee brief can be found here:  http://cnv.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/institucional-acesso-informacao/verdade-e-reconcilia%C3%A7%C3%A3o.html ↩︎
  4. The decree number 60.417 from March 11 1967 of the Brazilian constitution, once approved, started to cover up crimes committed by the military, and a year later, in 1968, the censorship decree (AI-5) was fully legalized, permitting political persecutions to occur out in the open. Thus, it became illegal to publicize or signal any trait or indication of corruption by the military, and even more, to be publicly against it. These, in short, were major steps towards the legalization process of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Even today, the vast majority of documents reporting and documenting the crimes of the military during the dictatorship are under the control of the military forces.  ↩︎
  5. Power’s describes six military legacies.  “Taking each legacy in turn, [he] contend[s] that modern Brazilian democracy has (1) confronted with a slow and fragmentary process of legitimation, given inevitable comparisons with the objective economic performance of the authoritarian period; (2) displayed a high level of continuity in personnel from the dictatorship; (3) dramatically expanded civil liberties as a result of the repression under military rule; (4) displayed unprecedented levels of political competition, again as a reaction to the highly controlled environment in the 1960s and 1970s; (5) evinced a delayed and cautious approach to transitional justice and human rights; and (6) expanded the repertoire of collective action in Brazil, particularly as an echo of the successful mass mobilizations that helped to delegitimize military rule in 1983-1984” (14). In this way, he underscores the political aspect of such legacies on the bureaucratic and administrative levels that persist in the country.  ↩︎
  6. The logic of exception debate by Arantes is the one described by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer. ↩︎
  7. Arantes shows how, in post-dictatorial countries, there is a pile of violations and exceptions that allows for the interpretation of a non-commonwealth. In other words, “in Brazil there is rule by law, but not rule of law” (Arantes “1964, o ano que não terminou,” 211).  ↩︎
  8. This passage from Arantes (“1964, o ano que não terminou,” 211) should not be understood as an Ufanist approach, but rather as an affirmation of the systematic invisibilization of atrocities of the past, which is out in the open and normalized.   ↩︎
  9. All present translations from the Portuguese to English are mine. ↩︎
  10. A good example of such “discrete symptoms,” which are reminders of the military dictatorship, can be found in the normalized brutality of the military police against the poor in Brazil.    ↩︎
  11. The Partido dos Trabalhadores is the name of the worker’s party in Brazil.   ↩︎
  12. Under Brazilian law, when a proven case of corruption in public office takes place, leading towards an impeachment (e.g, former Brazilian president Fernando Collor, who lost his political rights for eight years), the perpetrator loses her/his political rights. President Dilma Rousseff never lost her political rights, which is a clear indication that there was no proper legality or verifiable legal reasoning behind her removal from office. This was a democratic elected president being illegally removed for strictly political reasons. See more in Ab’Saber i, Michel Temer e o fascismo comum [Michel Temer and ordinary fascism] and Ab’Saber, Dilma Rousseff e o ódio político [Dilma Rousseff and political hatred].   ↩︎
  13. See more: Cadwalladr, CaroleFresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’:  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/04/cambridge-analytica-data-leak-global-election-manipulation. ↩︎
  14. Marx examines two different moments in French history (1848-51 and 1793-95), pointing out how a certain “caricature” of the past incarnated a haunting of the past. As Marx puts it: “Now they have not only a caricature of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he would have to be in the middle of the nineteenth century” [1851]. Thus, he highlights the need of getting rid of the superstition about the past.    ↩︎
  15. Freud’s The Uncanny is a fairly popular text where he examines the sentiment of unheimlich. In short, a paradoxical trait behind the uncanny sentiment (Dunker, “Animismo e Indeterminação em ‘Das Unheimliche’”) catches Freud’s attention from an aesthetic perspective, but Freud notices its presence in everyday life as well. The uncanny indicates a specific trait of both angst and fantasies. This trait has profound implications, which were investigated by Lacan, who underscores the topology of angst inspired by this text. More detailed implications of the uncanny in psychoanalysis can be found in Os desdobramentos do Infamiliar em Freud e Lacan [Uncanny Unfoldings: from Freud to Lacan] [not translated to English].   ↩︎
  16. Bolsonaro has been in Brazilian politics for more than twenty years. He was discharged from the military for planning to set explosives inside a headquarters and leaking the information to the press afterwards. The plan was frustrated because it reached the higher ranks faster than he could execute them (this is all public record). Bolsonaro then moved on towards politics, from 1991 to 2018, he served in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies representing the state of Rio de Janeiro. Now, three of his sons are following their father’s pathway.  ↩︎
  17. See more in https://theintercept.com/2021/06/08/brazil-congress-car-wash-corruption-merrick-garland/ ↩︎
  18. See more in El Pais (Brum, Eliane): https://brasil.elpais.com/opiniao/2021-07-07/bolsonaro-e-mito-sim.html ↩︎
  19. One must always remember that Bolsonaro was a federal deputy for 27 years and had only two projects ever being accepted. Thus, even though he was not new to politics, nor did he actually had anything to show for those years, he participated in Brazil’s State as a political part of the status quo. ↩︎
  20. Prior to Freud’s formulation of the Unconscious in this symbolic dialectic of power positions, we can consider how, already in 1807 (1977), Hegel’s master and slave  analyzed the power structure of this mythical domain through discursive transformations composing generic procedures.   ↩︎
  21. Badiou’s theory of subject defends how our relationship with reality comes from the way we position ourselves and engage ourselves to the truth of our desires. Grosso modo, there are three positions: the faithful, the reactive and the obscure. The position of the obscure subject is the one who completely denies the existence of any other alternative way to tell and live reality if it does not fit his own. ↩︎
  22. Freud’s investigation of myths starts in The Interpretation of Dreams with the Oedipus myth, which is approached as a clinical formalization for the dispositif of psychoanalysis, in order to translate the individual impasses Freud could hear from his analysands. Nonetheless, there is also, in Freud’s corpus, the myth of the primordial father, which re-enacts certain Oedipal logic towards collective inferences.     ↩︎
  23. In a televised lecture, Lacan states: “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.” (Television 34) A discussion of this passage requires a further exploration which can’t be done here, but Lacan talked profusely about the Subject and truth under the event of the unconscious. Badiou investigated this last dimension at great lengths in his oeuvre.  ↩︎
  24. A perspective that is analogous to the line of investigation one could follow on Badiou’s Trump (12).  ↩︎

Works Cited

  • Ab’Saber, Tales. Dilma Rousseff e o ódio político [Dilma Rousseff and political hatred]. São Paulo: Hedra, 2015.   
  • —. Michel Temer e o fascismo comum [Michel Temer and ordinary fascism]. São Paulo: Hedra, 2018.
       
  • Arantes, Paulo. “1964, o ano que não terminou“ [1964 as the year that never ends]. O que resta da ditadura: a exceção brasileira [What is left of the dictatorship: the Brazilian exception] eds. Vladimir Safatle and Edson Teles. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2010, 205-236. 
  • Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. New York: Continuum, 2005. 
  • —. Lacan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.  
  • —. Logics of Worlds. New York: Verso Books, 2013. 
  • —. Pocket Pantheon. New York: Verso Books, 2009.
  • —. Theory of the Subject. New York: Continuum, 2010.
  • —. Trump. New York: Polity, 2019.
     
  • Cadwalladr, Carole. “Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’” 2020. The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/04/cambridge-analytica-data-leak-global-election-manipulation
  • Dunker, Christian. “Animismo e Indeterminação em ‘Das Unheimliche’” [Animism and Indetermination in “das Unheimliche”] in Obras Incompletas de Sigmund Freud: O Infamiliar [The incomplete works of Sigmund Freud: the uncanny]. Autêntica, 2019, 199-218.
  • —. Lacan e a Democracia [Lacan and Democracy]. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2022.
  • —. Mal-Estar, Sofrimento e Sintoma [Discontent, Suffering and Symptom]. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.
  • Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. New York: Zero Books, 2009.
  • Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text. New York: Basic Books, 2010. 
  • —. The uncanny. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. 
  • —. “Totem and Taboo and Other Works,” trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955. 
  • Gonsalves, Rodrigo; Dunker, Christian; Estevão, Ivan. “Neopentecostalism as a Neoliberal Grammar of Suffering”. From Continental Thought & Theory: A journal of intellectual freedom. By Cindy Zeiher and Michael Grimshaw, volume 3, issue 1, Thinking Sin, 65-86.  
  • Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, ed. J. N. Findlay, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
  • Karatani, Kojin. The Structure of world history: from modes of production to modes of exchange. Translated by: Michael K. Bourdaghs. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 
  • Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. 1st. ed., New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2006. 
  • —. The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV. New York: Polity, 2021.
  • —. R.S.I Semináire 22, 1974, http://staferla.free.fr/S22/S22%20R.S.I.pdf
  • —. Television. October, 40, 6, 1987, doi:10.2307/778337 
  • Lazarus, Sylvain. Anthropology of the Name. London: Seagull Books, 2015.
  • Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1851, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf
     
  • Power, Timothy J. “The Brazilian Military Regime of 1964-1985: Legacies for Contemporary Democracy,” Iberoamericana, 2016, Nueva época, Año 16, No. 62, 13-26.
     
  • Safatle, Vladimir. “Do uso da violência contra o estado ilegal” [On the use of violence against the Ilegal State]. O que resta da ditadura: a exceção brasileira [What is left of the dictatorship: the Brazilian exception] eds. Vladimir Safatle and Edson Teles. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2010. 
  • —. “Lacan, revolução e liquidação da transferência: a destituição subjetiva como protocolo de emancipação política.” From Estudos Avançados. vol.31 no.91, São Paulo, dec.,2017. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0103-40142017.3191016 
  • Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile books, 2009.
     
  • —. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: 5 Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. New York: Verso books, 2005.