Anxious Politics: Contesting Fantasies Surrounding the Removal of Statues of Slavery and the Confederacy

Abstract

The summer of 2020 saw a global mobilization protesting the murder of George Floyd, during which statues glorifying white supremacy were toppled. Drawing on the narratives surrounding the removal of the Colston statue in Bristol and the Confederacy statues in New Orleans and Charlottesville, the paper examines the role of statues in the construction of political identities and social fantasies through Lacan’s theory of anxiety. For Lacan, anxiety tells us what subjects identify as threatening or familiar is not a reflection of objective circumstances but individual desires. By proposing the concepts of working against anxiety and working with anxiety, the paper examines (1) fantasies that aim to re-establish the old narratives and identities that were challenged in the process of statue removal and (2) practices that dwell in the moment of anxiety in an attempt to repair historical violences. The paper makes three contributions: firstly, to the literature on anxiety, the paper shows why anxiety is not an emotion but a building block of subject formation. Secondly, to the literature on commemoration, the paper demonstrates how statues affirm some identities while negate others, re-producing (racialized) violence; and to the literature on resistance, the paper demonstrates how deeply entrenched anxieties continue to constrict social progress.

Lors de l’été 2022, le monde a assisté à une mobilisation générale pour dénoncer le meurtre de George Floyd. Des statues qui glorifiaient la suprématie blanche ont notamment été renversées. En s'appuyant sur les discours relatifs à certains monuments retirés, la statue d'Edward Colston à Bristol et les statues confédérées à La Nouvelle-Orléans et Charlottesville, l'article analyse le rôle des statues dans la construction des identités politiques et des fantasmes sociaux en utilisant la théorie de l'anxiété de Jacques Lacan. Selon lui, l'anxiété nous indique que ce que les sujets identifient comme menaçant ou familier ne reflète pas de circonstances objectives, mais des désirs individuels. En proposant les concepts de travail contre l'anxiété et avec elle, l'article analyse 1) les fantasmes visant à réinstituer les anciens discours et identités qui constituaient des obstacles à l'enlèvement de ces statues, et 2) les pratiques qui s’éternisent sur l'anxiété pour tenter de réparer les violences historiques. L'article offre trois contributions : à la littérature relative à l'anxiété d'abord, car il montre que l'anxiété n'est pas une émotion, mais un élément constitutif de la formation du sujet; ensuite, aux littératures relatives à la commémoration, car il montre que les statues affirment certaines identités tout en en niant d'autres qui reproduisent la violence (racialisée); et enfin, aux littératures relatives à la résistance, car il montre que les anxiétés profondément ancrées continuent de limiter le progrès social.

Durante el verano de 2020 se vivió una movilización global en protesta por el asesinato de George Floyd durante la cual se derribaron estatuas que glorificaban la supremacía blanca. El artículo estudia, basándose en las narrativas que rodean el derribo de la estatua de Colston en Bristol y de las estatuas de la Confederación en Nueva Orleans y Charlottesville, el papel de las estatuas en la construcción de identidades políticas y fantasías sociales a través de la teoría de la ansiedad de Lacan. Desde el punto de vista de Lacan, la ansiedad nos indica que lo que los sujetos identifican como amenazante o familiar no es un reflejo de circunstancias objetivas sino de deseos individuales. El artículo estudia, mediante la propuesta de los conceptos de trabajar contra la ansiedad y trabajar con la ansiedad, 1) fantasías que tienen como objetivo restablecer las viejas narrativas e identidades que resultaron un desafío en el proceso de derribo de estatuas, y 2) prácticas que residen en el momento que tiene lugar la ansiedad y que intentan reparar las violencias históricas. El artículo realiza tres contribuciones: en primer lugar, contribuye a la bibliografía sobre la ansiedad ya que el documento muestra por qué la ansiedad no es una emoción sino una piedra angular en la formación del sujeto. En segundo lugar, el artículo contribuye a la bibliografía relativa a la conmemoración ya que el artículo demostró cómo las estatuas afirman algunas identidades mientras niegan otras a mediante la reproducción de violencia (racializada). El artículo también contribuye a la bibliografía sobre resistencia, ya que el documento demostró como las ansiedades profundamente arraigadas continúan restringiendo el progreso social.

Introduction

On June 7, 2020, in Bristol (UK), a statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was toppled during racial justice protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African–American man. The statue was pulled down from the plight, dragged into the harbor, and thrown into the waters just south of a bridge named after Pero Jones, the formerly enslaved resident of Bristol. The tearing down of the statue followed years of unsuccessful campaigns against a public display of an individual who transported and enslaved approximately 84.500 Africans (Nasar 2020). On the same night, Jen Reid, on her way back from the protests, climbed up the plight where Colston stood only hours earlier and raised her hand as a gesture of power. She stated: “When I stood on the plinth […] My immediate thoughts were for the enslaved people who died at the hands of Colston […] I wanted to give George Floyd power, I wanted to give power to Black people like me who suffered injustices and inequality” (Quinn and Reid 2020). Similar stories emerge throughout the world. In the United States, statues of white supremacy and the Confederacy have been at the center of heated debates and violent events. For example, in 2017, Charlottesville’s vice-mayor, Wes Bellamy, called on the City Council to remove the statue of General Robert Lee

. Bellamy was quoted to say that the presence of Lee's statue directly disrespects and offends parts of the Charlottesville community for what the statue represents (NBC29 2016). After the vote to remove the statue, a number of high-profile rallies were held protesting the decision. The rally that took place on August 12, 2017, drew international attention after Unite the Right clashed with counter-protesters. During the altercation, a car rammed into the crowds, killing Heather Heyer, a counter-protester, and injuring 19 (Hanna et al. 2017).

These events indicate that statues are invested with emotional attachments that exceed the bare commemoration of a person who they represent. As American historians show, statues of the Confederacy erected in the first part of the 20th Century were put in place to counter racial progress (Neroni 2021, 51–2). Thus, statues are not neutral entities, but invested with power dynamics, creating and legitimizing dominant histories (Winberry 1982). Jenny Edkins (2003, 32) outlines how statues are symbols of state sovereignty, they guide the process of memorialization and legitimize certain historical events and some nation’s histories over others. These “symbols are used to bond people around shared cultural values, ideals, and political ideologies” (Smith 2017). They are objects of identification impregnated with the values, histories, and memories communities share. Thus, it comes as no surprise that a continuous presence or a removal of a material object into which one’s (or a nation’s) identity is solidified invokes anxieties. What is the anxiety experienced in these political contexts, and how can a removal of a material object—such as a statue—incite it? These are the central questions this paper aims to answer. Rao (2016) notes that such anxieties are intrinsically linked with national identity, which a removal of a statue begins to question. The anxiety is only heightened by the agents of these challenges—minority and marginalized groups—who rarely find their histories and identities affirmed in these statues (Frank and Ristic 2020). Thus, while some subjects affirm the histories instilled in these statues, other “resisting subjects” aim to dismantle them (Rao 2016).

In this paper, I propose to call the interplay of misidentifications with statues anxious politics. Grounded in Lacan’s theory of anxiety (Lacan 2014), anxious politics describes affective and discursive processes through which individuals aim to contest and affirm their political identities. The theory of anxiety is used as a method of analysis in an attempt to uncover the fantasies and desires that individuals who oppose the removal of statues in particular harbor. Building on the idea of anxious politics, the paper draws on the statements that accompanied the toppling of statues depicting white supremacy and slavery with an aim to interrogate how anxiety shapes racist and anti-racist political actions. It shows how narratives of toppling are re-appropriated by the state or city governments, even everyday citizens, to recreate a sense of normality or to reattach the lost connection to familiar identities. Using anxiety as a method for analyzing selected statements, the paper aims to show how these narratives and fantasies anchor and secure only particular identities and exclude or create others as strange, foreign, or disturbing. In doing so, these fantasies refuse to acknowledge the humanity or equal subject position of those seen as others. Finally, by taking anxious politics seriously, the paper points to ways in which political identification can resist closure or a return to familiar narratives. In doing so the paper proposes a different way of approaching the deadlock of the removal/defense of statues of white supremacy and slavery.

The paper makes three interconnected contributions to the study of international politics. To the growing literature on anxiety, the paper deepens the conceptualization of anxiety in the field and demonstrates how anxiety is not an emotion or external force that impacts an already formed subject but a building block of subjectivity; to the literature on commemoration, the paper demonstrates how objects like statues affirm some identities while negate others and, in doing so, re-produce (historically racialized) violence; and to the literature on resistance and protest, the paper demonstrates how deeply entrenched anxieties continue to constrict social progress.

An exposition of anxiety and anxious politics in international politics and psychoanalytic theory opens this paper. Sections one and two outline what is at stake when speaking of anxiety politically and how anxiety is embedded in the structure of subject formation. In doing so, the paper proposes two ways in which anxiety can be mobilized in political contexts. The first is discussed in relation to the toppling of statues of white supremacy and slavery; here, the paper re-reads discourses surrounding these events through the prism of “working against anxiety.” This approach shows how statues form and reattach identities and how political responses that criminalize statue removals reclaim narratives about political events to stabilize some political identities at the expense of others. The second “working with anxiety” is mobilized in the final section to explore whether a different way of responding to statue removal is possible. Instead of closing down anxieties and re-instating narratives of control, the section dwells into how might a more inclusive and anxiety-attentive politics toward different identities look like. Anxious politics developed throughout this paper is thus an embodiment of negotiations between contested identifications and anxieties over the narratives that different subjects invest in these statues.

Anxiety in International Politics: Managing Uncertainty

In international politics, the idea of anxiety has been distinctly linked with security, be that in the context of ontological security (Steel 2008; Hom and Steel 2020; Kinnvall and Mitzen 2020; Rumelili 2021; Krickel-Choi 2022), immigration (Hirvonen 2017; Ali and Whithman 2018), or violence (Tavares-Furtado 2017; Heath-Kelly 2018). It can also be found in the literatures on the politics of emotions and affect (Solomon 2012) and geopolitics (Eberle and Daniel 2022). While anxiety is central to all, there is a difference in how it is understood. Ontological security draws mainly on the works of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck (Hom and Steele 2020; Rumelili 2020), who see anxiety as a fundamental ontological disruption causing collective and individual insecurities. With the notable exceptions of Kinnvall (2018) and Eberle and Daniel (2022), who draw on Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of anxiety, these works are preoccupied with determining what policies and practices might eliminate, eradicate, or prevent the experience of anxiety. They also see states as emotional, anxious subjects (Steele 2008). Similarly, theories of emotions and affect in international politics often describe anxiety as a feeling that is experienced or caused by a particular event or an object (Solomon 2012), while in terrorism and migration studies, the threats come from activities or subjects engaged in terrorism or immigration practices (Ali and Whithman 2018; Heath-Kelly 2018) or from the way states choose to govern society-wide anxiety (Eberle and Daniel 2022). While these are distinct areas of research, these works understand anxiety as an experience that is causing disruption and introducing uncertainty in an otherwise orderly space. As such, most understand anxiety as external to a society and to a political subject, as something that impacts and provokes reactions. While there are notable departures that question, for example, the temporal linearity of anxiety (Rossi 2017, 123–39), the achievability of security (Burgess 2017, 17–35; Eberle and Daniel 2022), or the identifiability of objects causing anxiety (Távares-Furtado 2017, 37–56), these approaches still strive to theorize “the end of anxiety,” identify strategies of anxiety-deployment for political ends, or examine anxiety-reducing practices.

In contrast, for psychoanalysis, anxiety is an affect that is not (only) experienced, but constitutive of the subject and the social (Lacan 2014, 14). As such, the subject cannot do away with anxiety, anxiety remains present, lurking behind fantasies of, for example, secured national identities. When experienced, anxiety becomes suffocatingly present. Temporally, anxiety is not something that is to come, but rather something that is very much here (Eklundh et al. 2017, 7). It works as a form of “anaesthesia,” penetrating and invading all the pores of social and political life (Bourke 2005). It either immobilizes the subject (Bernard-Naudé 2017) or spurts it into action with an aim to eradicate threats (Eklundh et al. 2017, 8–9). In Lacanian psychoanalysis, anxiety, or anxious politics, as this paper develops, is not about the management of anxiety but about understanding anxiety as a building block of our everyday—how it alters our relationships to politics and attaches itself to political objects such as statues. Subjects attachment to anxiety does not mean that political subject “live in a state of permanent anxiety, frat, or anguish” (Zevnik 2021, 1051). What it suggests, however, is that social and political realities (also known as fantasies) are constructed in a way that guard subjects from too much anxiety.

The distinction between fear and anxiety is particularly important. A closer look at the literature on anxiety in international politics reveals that what is presented as anxiety is in fact fear—an already tangible and manageable threat (Rumelili 2021). Fear arises from an identifiable object, whereas anxiety is to be distinguished from fear (Lacan 2022, 19) as it is something with an unknown source. That which triggers anxiety, as Lacan reminds us, is not a traumatic object (die Unheimlich), but Heimlich something “which appears in an unexpected way” (Lacan 2014, 75). This Heimlich occupant is not, as Lacan (2014, 76) continues, “the inhabitant of the house, it is the appeased and admitted hostile. That which has passed through Heim […] has never passed through the network and sieve of recognition.” Here Lacan (2014, 158) departs from Freud’s understanding of anxiety and shows how anxiety has an object, even though the object is elusive and non-identifiable. Lacan (2014, 27) names this object object a. Statues, I argue, can appear as illusions of this object. That is not to say that statues are anxiety-inducing or that they are real objects of anxiety, they are only representations of that which induces anxiety. When anxiety is experienced, signifiers attach to whatever it is that political subjects imagine as terrifying. In this way, to ease anxiety, signifiers attach “to what is otherwise an unfounded experience of unease” (Zevnik 2017a, 237).

If anxiety is so illusive to discursive representation, how can it be operationalized? From the existing literature on anxiety, two different understandings can be deciphered. One can be described as what I call “working against anxiety” and the other “working with anxiety.” “Working against anxiety” can be aligned with everyday politics, which seeks to manage anxiety through a presentation of numerous narratives and fantasies that seek out security. By identifying and creating anxiety-triggering objects, society can be more or less successfully securitized. In contrast, “working with anxiety” proposes the opposite. It is a refusal to empty the lack that destabilized political subjects, provide securitizing narratives, and identify and construct anxiety-triggering objects. As such, the second strategy is much more difficult to maintain, yet it is present in everyday politics. If “working against anxiety” is embedded in discursive practices, “working with” remains very much at the margins of representation. Working with anxiety suggests putting oneself in relation to the object a (an object that appears as lost)—that is embracing the uncomfortable presence of an object in a place that should be empty (Lacan 2014, 54). Working with anxiety is about transforming one's identity (subject position) while the Heimlich other is present. “On the one hand, the world,” Lacan (2014, 116) explains, “the place where the real bears down, and, on the other hand, the stage of the Other where man as subject has to be constituted, to take up his space as he who bears speech but only within a structure [… which has] a structure of a fiction.” Working with anxiety is then a transition from the stage to the world, a change in the way the subject as a speaking being is constituted. Anxiety, when thought about as “working with” rather than “working against” recognizes these two plains and a sacrifice a subject pays by transgressing from one to another.

This section firstly evaluated the existing literature on anxiety in international politics before proposing two distinct ways in which anxiety will be approached in the remaining of the paper. These are working against and working with anxiety. As the discussion shows, anxiety is embedded in the structure of the subject formation. To further grasp the significance of anxiety in the process of subject formation the next section turns to Lacan’s theory of the subject. The outline of this theory will allow for an in-depth understanding of the role political symbols have in processes of identity formation, as well as a consideration of how working with anxiety might break through a repeated cycles of fantasy formation.

Anxious Subjects of Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Theory

In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, a subject is a discursive entity that emerges with the intervention of language and that can only be comprehended in the field of representation. In fact, Lacan’s own definition of the subject is that “a signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier” (Lacan 2006, 694), making the subject an effect of language (Lacan 2006, 835). However, that does not mean that the entirety of the subject is represented in this process of signification. The subject in psychoanalysis is split. In Lacan’s earlier work, this split is between the subject of the statement—that is, the subject as it appears to itself and to the other (Van Haute 2001, 40)—and the subject of enunciation—that is, “the subject […] insofar as it is produced, cornered even, by discourse” (Lacan 2005, 36). If the subject of the statement is a representation of the subject in the Symbolic (that is, the order of representation and meaning), the subject of enunciation is the subject in the realm of the Real (that is, a realm of the unconscious that resists representation). This suggests that the subject is not the agent of speech, and that there is always something that exceeds meaning. “Enunciation can never be reduced to what is enunciated in the discourse,” as Lacan (2006, 758) states. Further, this is also why Lacan puts the unconscious in relation to discourse. He states that “the presence of the unconscious, being situated in the locus of the Other, can be found in every discourse, in its enunciation” (Lacan 2006, 787). It is for that reason that Lacan also defines the subject as “a subject only by virtue of his subjection to the field of the Other” (Lacan 1988, 188). The relationship between the subject and the Other is what is of particular significance when understanding the role of anxiety in subject formation.

The opening paragraph aims to demonstrate that subject is explicitly a discursive formation—human beings become subjects in and through discourse. In an attempt to add structure to this process of subject formation, I turn to Lacan’s idea of the Graph of Desire (Lacan 2006, 671–702). Lacan (2006, 675–92) states that with the intervention of signifiers (or language), the subject is “castrated” (deprived of drives and jouissance) and placed in relation to the Other (a form of authority or a master signifier). Two important processes, which frame the subject, take place in the moment of castration. I explore their consequences next. First, linguistically, this means that the subject is given a frame within which its existence makes sense. “When we come into language” Neroni (2021, 54) writes, “we must repress the way in which the meaning-making system is not closed and is impossible to finish.” What we repress is that we have no access to complete knowledge, certainty, or stability of signifiers (meaning production). The repressed splits the subject into its conscious and unconscious parts, creating a lack in its center. For Lacan, then, lack is the constitutive moment of every subject. It is something that subject experiences daily, when attempting to make sense of the world. “We feel a sense of lack because of what we can’t know about ourselves, and because of the very structure of our psyche and of language. In response, we are constantly trying to fill this lack” writes Neroni (2021, 54).

Affectively, in contrast, castration gives the subject a frame within which it can enjoy. In Lacan’s theory, jouissance (a form of absolute enjoyment) belongs to the realm of the Real, which is destructive and can decimate the subject (Lacan 2006, 696). Enjoyment is distinctly different from jouissance in that enjoyment belongs to the Symbolic. As such, it is representable, symbolizable, and devoid of any excess. Translating this into political speech, it can be said that castration—the barred access to jouissance—is a price the subject pays for its inclusion into a political community. Drawing on Hegel’s Master and Slave dialectics (sometimes also translated as relationship of bondage between lord and bondsman), Lacan (2006, 686) states that “the slave submits in giving up jouissance out of fear of death, is precisely the path by which he achieves freedom.” If in linguistic castration the subject represses the contingency of signifiers and ever achieving absolute knowledge, in affective castration repressed is the ability to ever achieve jouissance. However, this prohibition to jouissance does not prevent the subject from seeking it or locating it in figures who they deem foreign in a political space in which they show up. It is enjoyment, as Lacan (1990, 32) states in Television, that triggers racism. It is the other's enjoyment that is unbearable to us.

But how is then the linguistic and affective castration played out in relation to the Other and, in turn, identity formation? Žižek probably offers the best insight into this process. He states that at the level of the Other, a subject achieves identification in two ways. “Imaginary identification is identification with an image in which we appear likeable to ourselves […] what we would like to be,” whereas “symbolic identification is identification with the place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love” (Žižek 1989, 116). Imaginary identification alone opens numerous opportunities for interpreting political events, including anxieties around statue removals. Imaginary identification is often imagined as a subject’s identification with idols (assuming subjects identify with them because of some positive trait such as beauty, charitable work, and the like). Yet, as Žižek reminds us, the trait that draws the subject into identification is more likely linked with the subject’s repressed. Taking the elections of Donald Trump in the United States as an example, Trump and his voters face allegations of racism and a refusal to confront the realities of racial oppressions; however, these allegations do not harm his support. This is because “secretly” people do not wish to confront these allegations. They might agree that racism is wrong, but remain unwilling to address it. Žižek (1989, 117) attributes the unwillingness to “a refusal to “work through” [state’s] traumatic past.” Thus, by “evading confrontation with this past, [Trump] emphasized the exact trait of identification of the majority of voters” (Žižek 1989, 117). The trait of identification can—and in fact most often is—a failure, victimhood, or guilt. When considering identification, attention needs to be paid to the narratives of guilt and victimization as those draw on subjects’ repressed, and to the gaze, that is, who is the imaginary Other for whom the subject “wants to appear likeable” (Žižek 1989, 118).

The subject seeks the recognition of a signifier because a signifier defines its existence (Flower MacCannell 1996, 26–7). Politically, recognition is achieved when a subject gives up on that which distinguishes it from others or that which it has in excess. In effect, the subject begins to resemble those whom the subject recognizes as figures of authority and identify with their values and political goals. Van Haute (2001, 95–6) explains, however, that this imitation rarely results in the eradication of differences and discrepancies between “the political recognition a subject wants to achieve and a political recognition a subject can achieve.”

So what about this Other? It is in relation to it that subjects’ desires and fantasies are shaped. Desire in “its most natural function […] it is not only that it is subjected, in its agency, its appropriation, and even its normality, to the accidents of the subject’s history, but also that all this requires the assistance of structural elements” (Lacan 2006, 687). To unpack, without a lack there is no subject. It is for this lack that a subject is desiring, striving toward fullness it will never achieve. Desire is thus a force which ensures subjects’ forward movement. However, subject's desire is never one’s own desire but always created in relation to the Other, which leads Lacan (2006, 689) to conclude that a subject always desires through the Other (or subjects’ desires are managed by the Other). Politically, this interplay of desire and the Other is significant because it cements subjects social mandates. The Other “is the one who sees me” Lacan (2014, 23) says. In contemporary western politics, the Other overlaps with liberal ideology and stands for values such as equality or human rights. But, as Zevnik (2017b, 627) shows, the Other also stands for what are “acceptable ways of protest, political action, or political sacrifice” which in effect guard subjects from transgression. However, these mandates are always arbitrary and performative as they cannot be referenced back “to the “real properties and capacities of the subject" (Žižek 1989, 126). The arbitrariness of the mandate inevitably pushes the subject to question them, seeking reassurances from the Other. But instead of reassurance, the Other returns the questions of “Che vuoi?, What do you want from me?” (Lacan 2006, 690) back to the subject, as if the subject itself holds answers as to why it holds particular mandates.

“You’re telling me that, but what do you want with it, what are you aiming at?” (Žižek 1989, 123) also indicates that there is a gap between the subject of the statement and enunciation. At the level of a statement, you are saying this, but what do you actually want from me (Lacan 2006, 693) is how to describe subject’s relation to the Other. The effect coming from the unconscious enunciation marks a missing signifier—a signifier of a lack in the Other. The Other is asked to firm up the subject’s mandate, only that this process of questioning reveals the lack in the Other itself. “The lack at stake is,” as Lacan (2006, 693) writes, “one I have already formulated: that there is no Other of the Other.” To deal with the unbearable lack in the Other—the lack of certainty over, e.g., one’s social mandate—the subject creates fantasies. A certain leftover from the processes of signification opens a space for desire and reveal the Other (the Symbolic order) inconsistent; here “fantasy [is] an attempt to overcome, to conceal this inconsistency, this gap in the Other” (Žižek 1989, 139), to ensure (imaginary) control over the Other (Lacan 2006, 699). Fantasy is thus a response the subject forms to fill the gap opened by the “Che vuoi?” and to return a sense of stability in the symbolic order. It is thus also through fantasy that the subject re-creates the completeness of the Other and guards itself from the Other’s desires that it might not be able to identify with or fulfill. As Žižek (1989, 138) states “fantasy functions as ‘absolute signification’, it constitutes the frame through which we experience the world as consistent and meaningful.” What the Graph then shows is that “desire adjusts to fantasy,” it is really the “stuff […] that is primally repressed, because it can be indicated only in the fading of enunciation” (Lacan 2006, 691).

Returning to political parlance, the primary goal of fantasy is to help subjects position themselves in relation to the Other and, in turn, seek out political recognition or identification with a specific political community. Such fantasmatic narratives have a double role. While they reassure belonging to a community for some, they equally exclude others. Those outside often align with figures such as a migrant or a homeless person (Zevnik 2021, 1052). They are seen as possessing something that those who are “inside” have to “trade in or sacrifice” (Rogers 2017). Fantasies surround these sacrifices. They cover up the constitutive lack and create a story, a perspective, which gives life consistency and stability (Salecl 2000). The fall or endangerment of these fantasies is the moment when anxiety re-emerges. Salecl (2004, 24) writes: “Anxiety emerges when at the place of the lack one encounters a certain object, which perturbs the fantasy frame through which the subject assessed reality.” These objects can be material—various figures that are seen as endangering the coherence of a community—or ideational, but they are all “invented at the level of fantasy” (Hirvonen 2017, 258). “They can endanger or destroy fantasies of harmonious life,” as Zevnik (2021, 1052) writes, but they also reveal something about our relation to the self, the Other and to our fantasy. Žižek (1989, 192) explains that by stating that fantasy is a destabilizing dimension, the elementary form of which is envy, jealousy, and loathing. While fantasies are not exclusively negative, politically, this is where right-wing ideologies, nationalism, and racism steam from. “Fantasy becomes a collection of things that irritate us about others who need to be changed or eliminated” because, as Hirvonen (2017, 258) continues, they “are threatening our being, destroying our cultural heritage, invading our harmonious communities, intruding into our existence.”

If castration puts the subject in relation to the Other (linguistic or affective), then the excess of this process of signification can be summated in the emergence of the object a—the illusive object of anxiety (Lacan 2014, 131). Object a remains outside signification. As Žižek (1992, 135) explains, “the object a is the hole in the Real that sets symbolization in motion, the screen for the projection of our fantasies.” The object a is also the ultimate object cause of desire. What that means is that object a (this lack in subject formation) drives subjects to desire and seek out objects that they think would provide them with a satisfactory narrative and secure their world (Lacan 2014, 27). Thus, when Lacan (2014, 40) states that object a is the object of anxiety, he is speaking about a structural space that drives the subject forward, which makes it continue and go on. Object a can appear in many representations, but no representation will ever be able to grasp it fully. In fact, as Lacan (2006, 693) shows, object a has “no specular image, in other words, no alterity. This is what allows them to [take the shape of any] stuff,” to appear as substance or disguise as something they are not. In other words, anxiety is not triggered by objects that appear in the space of object a, what appears there is only the approximation of the object that actually stirs anxiety. What appears is a “tired lure of the shadow [masquerading] as if it were substance” (Lacan 2006, 693). The presence of something effectively limits the subjects freedom to desire, it stifles the subject and its desire. As Lacan (2014, 33) states, anxiety is an affective reaction to the absence of desire that should be there. If the subject’s desire is the desire of the Other, then a moment when the subject can no longer see itself in the desire of the Other (Lacan 2014, 53)—when it can no longer recognize its mandate or receive recognition—this is the moment of anxiety.

What does this lengthy exposition of Lacan’s theory mean for the two ways in which the paper proposes to approach the removal of political statues? In the frame of working against anxiety, which is explored next, the focus is on ways in which anxiety has been expressed and captured within discourse: how anxiety is represented, made sense of, and closed down. In effect, the focus will be on how subjects constructed and reconstructed fantasies shattered by the (threat of) removal of statues. Political statues, despite achieving a form of representation, will not be considered as objects of fear. That is because objects of fear actually trigger fear, whereas objects of anxiety are only “masquerading as substance” (Lacan 2006, 693). While a contestation of statues can also challenge the national identities and histories a particular political statue depicts, as Reeves and Heath-Kelly (2020) show, anxieties that are attached to these material objects go beyond these representations. By reading discourses that attempt to justify the presence of statues through the prism of “working against anxiety,” I show how subject positions, which defend statues, see them as markers of history or consider their removal a criminal act. These acts reaffirm some identities and guard those from anxiety.

Statues of the Confederacy and Slavery: Sites of Identification and Anxiety

Lacan’s placement of anxiety at the center of political subjectivity allows us to dwell on how material objects such as statues secure some political subjectivities while instil others with anxiety. Angela Kinlaw, an activist fighting for the removal of statues of the Confederacy in New Orleans (US), describes such anxieties well. She states:

Statues are symbols used to bond people around cultural values, ideas, political ideologies, and those ideas show up in systems that are protected by the state. […] When we look at our environment, we see that all of the major street names, all of the most revered monuments, all the parks that these kids and families are playing in […] All of this stuff is messaging, all of this stuff is psychological, all of this stuff has an impact (Kinlaw in Smith 2017).

To analyze this impact, I turn to the narratives surrounding the removal of the Confederacy statues in Charlottesville and New Orleans in the United States and the removal of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, United Kingdom. I analyze the two cases through the prism of “working against anxiety.”

Working Against Anxiety: Statues as Referent Points of History and Identity

Statue removals have been celebrated in some communities, while in others they have been violently protested. This testifies to the emotional attachments different groups have to these symbols. In Mitchell’s (2020, 580–93) analysis of how different communities in New Orleans experience the removal of statues, this divide is clear. There are those who are negatively affected by the statues and others who are not. A white man, for example, speaks in support of the monuments saying that: “We all know that slavery is wrong. Our history is sometimes painful but it makes us who we are in order to build a better future” (Mitchell 2020, 589). Such narratives are common. In Richmond, a white woman in a Civil War-era dress kneeled at the foot of General Lee’s statue and publicly grieve its dismantling. She stated that “the statues are history: take them down, and people forget” (Schneider 2020). In contrast, an African–American woman sees statues as an insufferable painful past. She states that: “the Lee monument represents the savagery committed against my people for generations. The Lost Cause [ideology] apparently is not completely lost […] people are actually wanting to continue to celebrate this hatred. It’s amazing, in 2015, I’m fighting Robert E. Lee!” (nola.com 2015, in: Mitchell 2020, 589).

At play in these statements are two types of anxiety: one that sees a removal of a statue as a removal of a signifier that reassures and secures one’s identity, and another that sees the presence of a statue a threat to their existence and an obstacle to their security. I will focus on the first anxiety that emerges with the opposition to the removal. Here, the white supremacist logics can easily be identified and overlap with the celebrations of the Confederate flags, parades, and white pride protests such as those organized to protect the Confederate statues in Charlottesville (Hanna et al. 2017; Laughland 2017). However, my interest is not in the anxiety experienced by white supremacists and the Confederacy apologists, but rather in why those who acknowledge the dire consequences of past and present racism and legacies of slavery still express attachments to statues and revert to the erasure of historical narratives.

As explained earlier, anxiety emerges when something appears in the place in which there should be nothing. This initial feeling of dread that something is “not quite right” displaces the subject or—as Lacan showed—destabilizes the normal process of signification, which anchored a subject in a socio-political space and gave it its mandate (Lacan 2006, 685–93). Anxiety puts the Other with whom the subject identified to receive its identity, or whose desire the subject thinks it is following, under question. To resolve the unease, the subject seeks out signifiers (material objects) that can stand in for subjects’ experiences. These are the representations or images (Lacan 2006, 693) that come to masquerade as anxiety triggers. In the case of a white man in New Orleans (Mitchell 2020, 589), the object that is triggering anxiety is a statue, and in particular its removal. Yet, the problem as such is not that the statue is removed, but what the act of removal allegedly stands for. According to him, the act is not about a removal of a material object, but about a dislocation or displacement of histories and legacies that the statue is supposed to represent. Further, it is about the threat to forget the good and the bad that come to “make us who we are” (Mitchell 2020, 589). Invoked in this statement is a Lacanian embeddedness of subjects within a socio-symbolic realm, but what the white man is forgetting is that the history he is referring to is only a particular representation of events and not a universal narrative with which every subject can identify. As Lacan stated, subject formation is dependent upon the intervention of a signifier into a chain of signification (Lacan 2006, 675–90); in this process of intervention, signifiers gain meaning, subjects gain identities, and the emerging symbolic order is seen as only natural. Thus, even if this white man from New Orleans wishes to preserve statues to learn from the past and to “build a better future” (Mitchell 2020, 589), the presence of statues endowed with dominant history will from the start deny equal subjectivity to those who see statues as anxiety-inducing or as denying of their humanity.

Those who campaign to keep the statues do so because they invest them with broader historical meaning. They even see them as signifiers of absolute knowledge, which covers their individual insecurities (their lacks) and allows them to function “normally” (Neroni 2021, 55). The exact meaning that subjects attach to these statues differs from one subject to another, but from a perspective of those in favor of keeping statues intact, they represent a sense of security in their identity. Writing about the symbols of the Confederacy, Neroni (2021, 55) states that these objects create “an Imaginary and nostalgic whole identity wrapped around the idea of the Confederacy as a lost site of plentitude.” They use these statues as a way of stabilizing their identities, and in the fight for their maintenance even invoke them as objects of their imaginary identification. Subjects defending them begin to identify with their symbolism and historical context. Thus, through the fight, they only further firm up the statues’ history and significance for identity formation. Those in favor of statues fail to acknowledge that their public display continues to dehumanize, as community members in both Bristol and New Orleans clearly state (Faye in: Mitchell 2020; Okundaye 2020). Colston, Lee, and others begin to represent fantasies of completeness (Neroni 2021, 56), and in doing so, they deny the humanity of others. “I am not a racist” (Mitchell 2020, 589), the white man in New Orleans states, but through a non-critical defense of these objects, the man has identified with racist histories that continue to de-humanize and de-subjectivize today. Following Lacan, if there was not a broader investment of meaning (an anchoring of a particular identity) in these material objects, then their removal would go unnoticed.

In the logic of “working against anxiety,” anxiety pushes the subject to either continue to act as if nothing has changed or to begin to defend statues as referent points that anchor their subjectivity. Politically, statues are part for what Winberry (1982) calls landscapes, which constitute social power relations. However, in the context of anti-racist protests, statues are trigger points to which people interacting in a particular landscape react. As he notes, “Landscapes are sometimes intentionally created […] to elicit feelings, to evoke action, and to seal identity” (Winberry 1982, 11). In this way, statues act like instruments of power, they are not only markers of history but are intentionally added to the landscape to convey a particular message (Winberry 1982). For example, if at the end of the Civil War, monuments were built to honor the Confederate soldiers, in the late 19th and 20th centuries they were built to unite southern whites and deny power to the region's African–American population (Leib and Webster 2015, 14). A confederate monument serves as a particular symbol of white belonging that is implanted into the city landscape (Leib and Webster 2015, 13–4). If, as Winberry shows, a display of these monuments in public spaces binds white southerners to common history, it alienates African–Americans or other newcomers, as a testimony of Kinlow, an African–American woman from New Orleans, shows (Smith 2017).

Those who oppose statue removals refuse to acknowledge the impact they have on others’ subjectivity. A subject formation is dependent on the attachment to a signifier, as it is a signifier that grants meaning (Lacan 2006, 708). Similarly, it is the other in relation to whom the subject seeks its identity. The insistence on symbols, which some find oppressive, is a way of refusing recognition (Zakarol 2018) and—as noted earlier—demanding that their identities are constructed in relation to these statues. Thus, the identities of those instigating a removal do not have to be defined by the statue, but they are pushed to acknowledge it. In this way, the identity of those who see statues as an affront is negated in its formation. These subjects can only exist as “colonial subjects” or as “formerly enslaved subjects,” as scholars of postcolonial theory in international relations point out (Bhabha 1994; Jabri 2012). While their identity does not need to be determined by these political symbols, it remains build in relation to them, restricting them to the experience of colonialism or enslavement, negating pre-colonial/pre-enslavement histories as well as those that have taken place since (Jabri 2012, 17–9). Such positioning of others subjectivities, however, acknowledges what Bhabha (1994, 25) calls the continuation of “colonial structures,” which refers to a continuity and persistence of colonial and enslavement logics.

Thus, the aforementioned defense of statues on the grounds of history cannot be understood in neutral term. Statues do not simply represent history or neutrally observe it. Instead, they enact it and continue to provide opportunity for subjects to create attachments and invest them with personal narratives. A removal of a statue threatens to undo these attachments and interpretations not only of subjectivity but also of the landscape. In acknowledging a racist nature of statues and yet insisting on their importance (Mitchell 2020, 589), the white man from New Orleans defends a constellation of the old power relations maintained in these statues. What he also defends is the continuation of dehumanization of those who find these statuses an affront. These statues continue to tell a story of the nation, from which some are excluded or only included as those who are subjected to violence and exploitation.

Working Against Anxiety: Jouissance and Re-Claiming the Narrative Through Criminalization

The raising of the Colston statue in 1895, 174 years after his death, aligns with the logic seen in the Confederate statues, in that the statues’ appearance is not commemorative but symbolic with great political and social messaging. Colston’s statue was “designed to encourage the citizens of today to emulate [his] noble example and walk in his footsteps” (Nasar 2020, 129). Large sums of money were donated to schools, hospitals, churches, and other public institutions that began to carry Colston’s name. This created and upheld Colston’s legacy and turned him into one of the most important Bristolians, a key benefactor of the city, and a great philanthropist (Nasar 2020, 128–30). Local communities were unsuccessfully campaigning for its removal, some progress has been achieved when the Council agreed to put a plaque explaining Colton’s involvement in slave trade, but the implementation of that decision was blocked.

Mixed responses accompanied the removal of his statue during the June 7, 2020 protests. Some agreed that the statue had no place in modern British society, others were more critical about it. The removal triggered calls for “law and order” across the political spectrum and a significant portion of the general public (Stewart and Proctor 2020). For example, at the time British Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned these actions, calling them acts of vandalism for which people should be held responsible. The opposition leader Keir Starmer acknowledged that a statue of Colston had no place in modern society, but stated that the removal “shouldn’t have been done in that way, [it was] completely wrong to pull a statue down like that” (Stewart and Proctor 2020). The overall narrative emerging from the opposition leader seems to have been that morally, the statue should not have been there, but that it was equally wrong to remove it in an act of violence. The emphasis on the lack of “orderly removal” resonated in the responses of not only the Government but also the Members of the Parliament (MPs). Tory MPs went further, stating that their constituents demand law and order and a stop to vandalism. One stated: “If there’s one thing my voters can’t stand, it’s rioting. To them, it’s an anathema to the democratic process” and “people don’t want soft-touch policing” (Stewart and Proctor 2020).

The process of subject formation involves castration as a curtailment of jouissance to fit social norms (Lacan 2006, 671–702). Yet, jouissance does not just disappear, it is displaced into (racialized) others while traces of it remain inscribed on the subject's body (Lacan 2006, 695–7). This displacement of jouissance has two consequences. One is that the subject begins to desire that which is representable—or “desire is law” (Marriott 2018, 170); and two, the subject begins to desire that which is prohibited or beyond the law. It is precisely this transgression of the limits (of the law) that the subject finds enjoyable. The management of enjoyment becomes a central task of social fantasies, in which those who are seen as different are represented as having access to jouissance. Race and racism overlap with access to such jouissance (Lacan 1990, 32). Racism calls into play, as Miller (1998, 125) writes, “a hatred which goes precisely towards what grounds the other’s alterity, in other words, its jouissance.” Thus, for Lacan, racist violence spurts from the assumptions the subject makes about the other’s enjoyment. The other enjoys too much by breaking the law, disregarding the social order, and tearing down statues. This turn to the language of law and order in British society speaks to the predominant fantasies that saw an unruly and law-breaking crowd enjoying excessively at the expense of law-abiding citizens. It is assumed that by breaking the law with protests or destruction of public property those engaged in these activities “enjoy”—they have access to jouissance, which obedient voters suffering from protestors’ excesses had to sacrifice. A plea for stronger application of law and order acts as a mask for a sacrificed joussance. Here, the unlawful statue removal brings up the existential anxiety of belonging to the community. If the price one has to pay to belong to a community is one of jouissance, then those who are seen as enjoying limitlessly can no longer be part of it. The law and order narrative becomes a fallback strategy to re-instill order in jouissance—it is to exclude or penalize those who enjoy limitlessly and secure identities of law-abiding citizens.

Social fantasies are representations of anxiety, which in themselves do not tell us much about anxiety; they only reveal what object triggered a response and what appears to us as terrifying (Zupančič 1998, 67). The call for law and order is only one such fantasy. While from a moral perspective, a removal of the statue was seen as less contested, the terrifying moment was expressed through the law and the narrative of criminalization. Even those who morally supported the act felt that someone should be responsible for the incurred criminal damages. Following Lacan’s theory of anxiety, law becomes important for the understanding of statue removals because a reintroduction of law is a re-introduction of the signifier from a space from which known representation has been expelled (Lacan 2014, 75–6). The emptied space provokes anxiety as the signifier of identity has nothing to hang upon. In an attempt to reclaim the narrative and re-inscribe the fantasy of law and order, in December 2020, four people faced criminal charges for causing damage to the statue (Murray 2020). Similarly, instead of leaving Colston at the bottom of the harbor, the statue was fished out and taken to the museum (Choksey 2021). The aftermath of the toppling of Colston speaks of the attempt to reclaim the narrative—if a protest tested the fantasies of law and order, the actions in its aftermath attempted to reinstate it and secure identification. The appearance and a swift removal of the Jen Reid statue—a protester who stood on Colston’s plight while returning home from protests—speaks to this reclaiming as well. The statue of Reid stayed up for 24 hours before it was removed. Choksey (2021, 82) juxtaposes those 24-hours to the 134 years for which the statue of Colston stood in the Bristol harbor.

The Anxious Subject of Working Against Anxiety

Throughout the above discussion, I showed that statue removals trigger existential anxieties in some subjects, while others remain displaced precisely because of statues’ presence. However, that which triggers anxiety are not the statues themselves, but the investments that subjects place in them—that being either narratives of collective histories, social transformations, law and order, and others. And yet even these investments (which translate into social fantasies) are not the “real” causes of anxiety. Instead, that which stirs the subject remains unaccounted for but what we know is that it relates to the other as a hostile and how this other appears, disturbs, and questions one’s identity. What then emerges in the place that should remain empty are shadows and residues of that which subjects perceive as threatening to their existence. As we have shown in the reading of Lacan’s institution of the subject, the logic whereby the subject is constituted in relation to the Other and the Other’s desire, places a fundamental instability into the subject. Summarizing that, Miller (1998, 122) writes: “At the heart of my identity to myself, it is the other who stirs me.” That other is not the Other who returns our identity, affirms social mandates, or responds affirmatively to “Che Vuoi?,” but the one who, in earlier discussions, was named Heim(lich), not the occupant, but a hostile who was appeased and admitted into our world (Lacan 2014, 76).

What is at stake in anxiety and is expressed in the subject’s relation to representations that appear to inhabit the otherwise empty space of object a, is the fundamental question of difference (or alterity). Hostility toward jouissance or changes in the symbolic order all point to anxiety over what might happen should one day the alterity of the other disappear, and with it the subject's identification and knowledge of who the subject is. Digging deeper into the space of object a, a feeling of envy appears. Fanon (2008) in Black skin, white masks, links racial difference to the envy of jouissance (an aspect explored above) attained by transgressing the law. Another envy, however, is one I name the envy of the signifier. Subjects defending statues are envious of the attention that others—those deemed undeserving of the attention because they do not play by the rules of jouissance—receive. Anxiety here stands for a possibility of a dislocated signifier that might attach, bring to life, and legitimize a different symbolic order. If that were to happen, these subjects’ identities and social mandates could be denied. As a result, they will no longer know how to orient themselves in relation to the Other. The mentioned example of Trump’s voters supports this. Narratives of victimhood and denial are strongly present in modern societies; people identify with them not necessarily because they believe them to be true, but because they provide a sense of security—e.g., they ensure that dominant subject positions will be defended against others who threatened them. The hostility against those who want to remove statues can derive from something as banal as a requirement to acknowledge the legitimacy of different subject positions, or as envy of the attention another is receiving over historical and contemporary violence and discrimination.

Anxiety—when read as an experience of a subject emptied of that which the subject knows—can also be a transformative force. If working against anxiety is precisely about ways in which the subject fights off attempts at destabilizing its identity, social mandate, and that which it knows, then working with anxiety is a way of pushing the subject towards these transformations. Anxiety is, as Lacan states (2022, 218), “the instant when the subject is suspended between a moment at which he no longer knows where he is, and a shift toward a moment when he will become something in which he will never be able to find himself again.” If the above are examples of anxious moments in which the subject attempted to retract and return to a moment in which it knows itself, in working with anxiety, the attempt is to seek out what is at stake if the subject pushes forward into spaces in which the subject will no longer be able to find itself.

The above discussion shows how political symbols act as anchoring points for individual and group identities that, when removed or disturbed, trigger anxieties about one’s role in the society. The narratives that insist on the historical significance of statues remain blind to how these political symbols impact others who find statues an affront. The unwillingness to acknowledge the effect these symbols have on others is a result of existential anxiety that a lack of symbols might expose. This section looked at two strategies with which those opposing statue removals aim to secure their identities: imaginary identifications and subject formation in the context of statues of the Confederacy, and jouissance and transgression in the context of Colston. The next section begins to discuss what is at stake in anxious politics. Returning to the core ideas about subject formation and anxiety, I draw out a politics toward statues of white supremacy that comes closer to the politics of working with anxiety.

Anxious Politics: Toward “Working with Anxiety”

Working against anxiety describes a distinct subject position that relies on social fantasies to create and support social order. The examples of statues from the United States and the United Kingdom showed how intimate attachments to these objects either enable or prevent identity formation, and how their removal triggers anxieties in some while affirms identity of others. Social fantasies regulate the experience of unease caused by these anxieties. Fantasies of fullness, for example, center statues as anchoring points through which subjects can imagine themselves as complete; whereas fantasies of transgression imagine the horrors that might occur should statues be removed. Neither of the two fantasies is particularly transgressive, especially if, following Lacan (2014, 75), anxiety enables transformation by cracking open the frame within which the subject exists. Working with anxiety then means exploring where might such opening lead to. Undoubtedly, this is a displacing, disturbing, and even violent process that requires subjects to recognize the legitimacy of other subject positions, other identities, and ways of enjoyment that at first appear foreign. Moments of such openings exist even within the described situations of statue removals.

Narratives that accompany statue removals pointed toward the disturbance a removal has caused. In an attempt to appease “both sides,” Keir Starmer stated that the Colston statue “should have been brought down properly with consent and put […] in a museum” (Starmer quoted in: Eyres and PA 2020). Similarly, in the United States, city governments, in an attempt to silence racial justice protests, began removing statues of the Confederacy. “These officials offer removal as a means of rejecting an ugly racist past while ignoring deeply rooted inequalities and contemporary state violence to which those symbols were closely tied in the eyes of many in the black community,” as Mitchell (2020, 582) writes. Such a scramble to remove statues of white supremacy was not a moment of transformation or even transgression (aligning with fantasies of transgression), but an attempt to maintain control over the narrative. By adopting the discourse of Black Lives Matter city governments interpret the Confederate monuments as emblems of systemic and structural racism. They reclaimed the discourse of local activists and credited themselves for “progressive” actions. For example, a white mayor of New Orleans, “whose eyes have suddenly been opened” was credited with the statue removal, not the black activist who campaigned for decades, as Mitchell (2020, 587) shows. By removing these statues, city governments made claims to having addressed structural and systemic problems, they portrayed racism and racial injustice as issues of the past, and a way of washing the present moment of these damning histories. The Mayor of New Orleans, Mitchell Landrieu, announced that “the Confederacy was on the wrong site of history and humanity. […] We must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’s Confederate monuments. […] Now is the time to take stock of and then move past a painful part of our history” (Mitchell 2020, 585). The city governments aimed to avoid what happened in Bristol, where campaigns to remove the Colston statue were met with the resistance of the Bristol council and the wealth of secretive societies like the Merchant Venturers (Faye in Okundaye 2020). At the end, a forceful removal remained the only option. A managed removal of statues by local governments closes down discussions about histories of violence while they continue to live on in social structures. A managed removal is thus not a moment of appeasement between the “two sides,” nor a moment or transgression that would open space for a re-narration of histories and a re-inscription of identities; it results in only another example of how anxious politics is managed toward the maintenance of the status quo.

A return to Lacan’s distinction between the stage and the world offers a more attentive approach to the openness of identification and meaning-making that anxiety introduces (Lacan 2014, 116). Anxieties materialize at the level of the stage—within a closed-down interpretation and understanding of social mandates, identities and symbolic order—by opening it up and revealing it as nothing but subjectively or collectively build-up fantasies that can be changed. Anxiety, as Lacan (2014, 116) states, is “the world, where the real bears down.” This world without frames onto which subjects can hinge upon becomes a new space of politics. In this space, “we have to refuse the comfort provided by the horizontal mode of identification… and learn to recognize the absolute singularity of each subject's mode of inscription in the social,” as Voruz (2008, 80) writes. What that means is that in the world, there are no already-formed ways in which the subjects relate to the Other, obtain identity, meaning, or claim jouissance. That does not mean that the structures through which subjects obtain their identities and make sense of the world are gone; it simply suggests their re-inscription and change.

Such alternative frameworks of subject formation emerge in relation to jouissance. This is unsurprising, as it is precisely its exclusion in the described process of subject formation that makes this process work (Lacan 2006, 687–98). Recall the earlier discussion about the centrality of envy—and in particular the envy of jouissance—in racism and hatred toward alterity. Thus, working with anxiety suggests a recognition of that alterity, first, as the excluded entity and second as a symptom that reveals the truth of the structure. The revealed truth is that subject formation is maintained by this exclusion (Zevnik 2016, 41–2). In other words, alterity is outside of subject formation. However, as such, alterity does need to be embodied in, for example, colonial subjects or immigrants who, in particular moments, disrupt the socio-political space. In such a structuralist idea of subject formation, the assumption of their presence already triggers a response. Marriott (2018, 138) explains this when stating that “blackness [is not] a repressed stimulus to anxiety of the subject [ … anxiety] continues to be informed by a negrophobic structure,” such is, for example, the structure of subject formation.

Thus, to embrace the world, subjects need to forego fantasies that provide them with a sense of ease or security. In other words, a subject has to traverse the fantasy. In Žižek’s (1989, 144) interpretation, “in “going through the fantasy,” we must in the same move identify with the symptom: we must recognize in the properties attributed to [the other] the necessary product of our very social system; we must recognize in the “excesses” attributed to [the other] the truth about ourselves.” The other, or alterity, that Žižek speaks about here is what Lacan names Heim in the context of anxiety. In working with anxiety, the subject needs to identify with alterity—the excluded part of subject formation that at once sustains and disrupts our identity. “To “identify with a symptom” means to recognize in the “excesses,” in the disruptions of the “normal” way of things, the key offering us access to its true functioning” (Žižek 1989, 144).

If statue removals are open to the fantasy of re-appropriation and continuation of the same alterity-phobic structures, what politics might come closest to the politics of working with anxiety? In the aftermath of the protests that saw the removal of Colston, a graffiti “is a racist” appeared on the statue of Winston Churchill in the Parliament Square in London. Immediately, the British police boarded up Churchill's statue “to prevent further damage” (Stewart and Proctor 2020). In 2017, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statues of Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson; yet a lawsuit and a temporary injunction held up the plans. After a string of rallies, the city voted to shroud both statues in black (Held 2018). However, this too was legally challenged, and the statues had to be uncovered. Soon after, the statues have been covered in red paint and graffiti, damaged with a chisel, or political writings such as “Black Lives Matter,” “Impeach Trump,” or “This is Racist” were written all over them (WTVR 2019). There are numerous other examples of statues being painted, “damaged,” or having political messages written over them. However, such a public challenge of the meaning that a statue is invested with speaks to how one might work with anxiety. Rather than removing a statue and preventing a public discussion of racial oppression from taking place, leaving it open for new inscriptions can challenge the histories a statue is invested in or the identities it anchors. Here, statues become spaces where the alterity of the other becomes undeniably visible. With inscriptions such as “is a racist” or “Black Lives Matter,” these practices directly oppose historical contexts within which statues emerge—for example, Colston’s noble life and philanthropy, the statues of the Confederacy to seal white identity on the landscape of the American South—and challenge the subject’s fantasies of completeness. The subject can no longer identify or obtain identity in relation to these statues without recognizing alterity.

With added inscription on statues, those in positions of alterity claim recognition in the emerging symbolic order. If in working against anxiety, the alterity of the other remains scripted as the outside with new fantasies emerging to strengthen the exclusion; in working with anxiety, the alterity is inscribed on the body of a statue itself, its material visibility and presence can no longer be denied. As such—in working with anxiety—if statues remain the objects of identification or markers of history, that history and identity can no longer repress the “sorrow past” the white man in New Orleans was talking about. That sorrow past becomes visible not in its glorified form, but with the violences—now directly inscribed on the statue—it continues to cause. Whether such practice leads to an alteration of how subjects derive to their identity and social mandates, and how they relate to anxiety, which will (continue) to disrupt their fantasies, remains unknown, but a visibility of alterity or Heim on the object masquerading as anxiety-inducing comes closer to a different social frame than does a denial of the others’ existence. Thus, in working with anxiety, a questions is no longer whether the statue that appeared in the space that should remain empty and that masquerades as an object of anxiety should remain or be removed, the question becomes how it can be disfigured to disclose the violences it represents. Through these practices, it becomes significantly more difficult for a statue to continue to anchor identities and social fantasies that remain ignorant of others’ difference.

Conclusion

The main task of this paper was to answer: what is the anxiety experienced in political moments in which statues of slavery or the Confederacy are challenged, and how can a removal of a material object such as a statue incite it? Drawing on Lacan’s theory of anxiety and subject formation, the paper showed how anxiety is embedded in the processes of subject formation and, in particular, how identities that cement subjects into performing particular social roles hinge on external (even material) objects. While objects of identification are fluid, in moments of anxiety, they attach to something that subjects assume will secure their identity. The statues of the Confederacy and slavery can perform such a role. Following the statements by those who oppose the removal of statues, the paper outlined the various fantasies that subjects invest into these political object—be those of the forgotten history, law and order, or even democratic values. By drawing on what is described here as “working against anxiety,” the examples of the removal of the Colston statue and the statues of the Confederacy in Charlottesville and New Orleans demonstrated how these fantasies of history, and law and order are only attempts at re-establishing the narratives that continue to dismiss historical and contemporary violence exposed by those in positions of alterity. They aim to firm up what, in Lacan’s theory, is described as the frame of anxiety (2014, 116). In contrast, working with anxiety, tackled in the final section of the paper, attempts to embrace the openness anxiety introduces into the frame. No longer the frame, but the world, as Lacan (2014, 116) states. Here, the practice of statue disfigurement (with graffiti, paint, and a chisel) is presented as a practice that remains open to different identifications and subject formation. A disfigurement makes visible the contestations of the otherwise ignored historical and contemporary violences and prevents a re-production of fantasies that remain blind to this violence. When disfigured, a statue that masquerades as the object of anxiety can no longer be removed or maintained in its original state; instead, it persists with inscriptions (graffiti, etc.) and testifies of contesting experiences, histories, and temporalities. As such, it might turn into an object that facilitates public discussions of racial oppressions rather than an object that either with its orderly—city or state-sanctioned—removal, pre-empts such discussions from taking place.

Anxious politics, a term proposed in this paper, brings together practices of both working with and against anxiety. It describes a number of different strategies that secure subject formation through the process of attaching identities to external symbols and signifiers, such as the statues, with an aim to alleviate the experience of anxiety. It also describes practices that leave the process of identification open and refrain from creating new fantasies securing some identities at the expense of others. In doing so, anxious politics does not attempt to manage anxiety. Instead, it reveals processes that attempt to do so with an aim to expose their stifling (or discussion-closing) intent. An orderly removal of statues by city governments to prevent discussions of racial oppression is one example discussed here. Further, and more broadly, anxious politics also reveals processes that, at times, can be transformative. A disfigurement of statues as a way of inscribing alterity on the assumed object of anxiety is an example of that. More broadly, then, anxious politics can be a way of identifying, engaging, and embracing transformative political practices, while also acknowledging the dangers of “quick solution” that often accompany politically contentions moments.

Author Biography

Andreja Zevnik is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester. Her research draws on critical and postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis and examines the production of subjectivities and different political imaginaries in acts of resistance amongst various marginalized groups.

Notes

Author's note: The author would like to thank the Editors of International Studies Quarterly, and the two anonymous reviewers for very helpful and constructive comments in the review process. Gratitude also goes to Moran Mandelbaum, Catarina Kinnvall, Peter J Burgess, and Henry Maher as well as to the participants of the Race and the International panel at the ISA 2021 online conference, and the participants of the Extimacy conference in Beirut, Lebanon in February 2020.

References