Father’s Wars
For someone who seeks peace and being awarded for it, having promised to make America great again, the US current president Donald Trump has his fingers in as many pies abroad as his predecessors. It is not long since the war of decivilisation in Gaza came to a fragile stop at the modest estimate of seventy thousand people killed, one quarter of them children. The American president is busy at it again, this time coming to the aid of Benjamin Netanyahu to help fulfil the latter’s long-lived dream of Iran’s annihilation.
In this case we witness one obliteration operation, most recently of the university in Teheran, after another with the intense bombardments by US and Israel aiming to cripple, not only the regime, but also the population. The enemy is political, regardless of any direct threat that may or may not be invented post factum. We are still waiting for a reason why to go alone – “sending them to the stone age where they belong”, being an example of Trump’s thinking – given no allies have rushed to aid the military attack. Is the world tired and weary of wars and of unilateral operations? This question would not have been valid at the time of Iraq war during which the pre-emptive strategy was nevertheless crucial. But at least then the reason of invasion, the so-called “weapons of mass destruction”, was given prior to the attack.
The term “political enemy” is not new and has been redefined from Sun Tsu to Napoleon to Churchill who associated making enemies with standing up for something in life. In a more pragmatic way, Abraham Lincoln, one of the fathers of modern America whose name is borne by one of the largest plane carriers, concluded in his time: “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends”. This daring link between an enemy being a friend remains unsurpassed by his descendants in the US today. Carl Schmitt, known for his eminent work on the sovereign, was more Freudian on that: “The political enemy need not be morally evil... he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in an especially intense way, existentially something different and alien”1. This road to the unconscious is already laid there. We are not going to blame the psychopathic rulers of today of being impervious to a reflection on it. It makes them no less susceptible to it. We can modestly pose that the gradual liquidation of the representational order of politics today, is a direct effect of the real of each ruler who has not recognised this path.
That’s why the political enemy can be regarded as an extension of that most intimate speaking being that Freud already singled out. He already had an idea of the Neighbour Complex very early on in his work where he considers its real component, das Ding, to be an example of an unmovable, and therefore hateful, object. The supporters of the theory of primacy of hate included at first Freud whose reflection on war and death led him to conclude that hate and love maintain an ambivalence in relation to the object2. But it was chiefly espoused by Wilhelm Reich for whom the primary encounter of hate was that with the father. What stands out in the logic of such encounters is that the father always presents itself as an object being hated. This supposition of primacy of hatred appears as consistent with the pre-emptive strategy in the recent obliteration-operations. Freud’s formula that “it is not me who hates him; it is him who hates me”3, is enlightening here. Some politicians are particularly inclined to spend their entire lives to prove the other wrong. Where does this power of repetition come from if not from that real that has no past, no history, no future and, therefore, no representation?
The political scene today is doubtless occupied by modes of obscenity we never encountered. Following from the decline of symbolic patriarchy, it has brought us to emergence of a neo-patriarchal call to father’s jouissance or to his père-version. Traversing the excesses of power from the God-king of Louis XIV to president-King of Trump, doubtless fuelled the trickling of the media interest in the latter’s exhibitions but now reached a point of boredom. Once speech no longer serves to conceal the object it circumscribes, the shameless object appears right in front of our faces (glorification of violence, praise of the opponent’s death, and insults of another politician’s private life, etc.) If the object’s function in analytic process brings to mind J.-A. Miller’s surprising discovery that the global discourse today has a structure of the analyst’s discourse4, this revelation has much further-reaching implications. The place of the object in the analyst discourse, is usurped by the political figure that hits the subjects hard and relentlessly. This will not reorient their relationship with the real but produce more suffering. A reorientation of the real can only be provoked by the discarded object, no longer belonging to the subject or to the Other. Why would anyone give themselves to the hands of politicians, the “zealots of God” who have denied the unconscious that guides them and follow, like the obscene object they personify, satisfactions carpe diem? Has a “good” politician ever envied a “bad” one more? This doubtless also goes for good journalists and intellectuals.
It is both odd and predictable to see the Netanyahu-Trump couple at work. This délire à deux does not surprise us if we think of G. Bush the son and T. Blair. Predisposition to war, to use Freud’s term, owes a lot to the pulse of identification with the father. Who, then, was Benjamin Natanyahu’s father? A renown historian and scholar, specialising in Medieval history, especially of Jews in Spain, Ben-Zion Netanyahu was born in Warsaw, under Russian occupation, under the name of Mileikowski. It was common then for Jews to change name, and so he adopted the name Netan-yahu, a “God-given”. He was perceived by many, including M. Begin, as an extreme right-wing believer in Zionism5. It was his first lesson to his son. Ben-Zion worked closely with Jabotinsky who is credited with establishing the Zionist movement based on the idea that Jews and Arabs must be kept apart at any price, and that Israel must dominate the Middle East in size and power. Although the idea persistently ignores the proximity of Hebrew and Arab languages, Ben-Zion did not give it up. As a Medieval scholar, he taught in America and was well acquainted with the history of Inquisition. His support for it as an agent of persecution was not a secret. Nor was his interest for the Marranos, the Jews who were forced by the same Inquisition to convert to Catholicism or face exile or death. This produced an internal conflict among the Jews who hated the converted Marranos, which for Ben-Zion was the continuation of ancient hatred already present under Egyptian rule. In 2009, in an interview for the Ma’ariv newspaper, he stated that “The tendency toward conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet. His existence is one of perpetual war”6. Ben-Zion knew his enemy. To know your enemy is the first principle of war and like his son he has been at war with Arabs all his life. It was this predisposition to know your enemy, rather than to “know thyself” that was inscribed on the body of Europe since the time of Delphic oracle, that Benjamin inherited from his father, pushing towards implementation of war after war throughout his political career. Were all these wars a plea of innocence? “The Arabs won't be able to face the war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won't be able to exist, and they will run away from here”7.
These wars will never change. They belong to the eternal knowing of your enemy that is never kept at a sufficient distance to put an end to the intimacy of killing. He who hates me will always hate me. This was for Lacan a measure of distance, of separation and of a sign that one wants nothing from the Other. But to come close to obliterate and to cleanse the people implies the aggressor still wants something from the destruction. It is this wanting that belongs to the “zealots of God”, and to the delusion of the promise to be fulfilled, that today defines the body of the political enemy that disturbs the belief in the promise’s fulfilment. This wanting will therefore never cease to be disturbed because the discourse of the unconscious as we experience it every day cannot be satisfied. Instead, the unconscious will never stop marking promises as broken, half-met, compromised, and forgotten. The discourse of fulfilled promise is not for humans.
A different way is then to be found, that of desire that acknowledges what it lacks to be a desire. It is not hatred as supposedly coming from the Other that has justified war. The belief in the just cause of war, stands at the root of B.-H. Lévy’s belief in just wars: “How many times must we repeat it? There are just wars”8. There are also times to reflect. Lévy, an eminent philosopher and intellectual, believes in “American democracy” and in the just father who wages just wars: “Trump’s war against Iran is just”. To grasp this belief we must humbly, with Freud and Lacan, reiterate the argument and hear in it what emerges in the predisposition to war as inherent, i.e., inherited. The inherent traits of this inheritance, as reiterated by Schmitt, amount to a hatred for difference. Even if we called difference the building block of the discourse, the One of the fabric of the unconscious, we would not render it lovable. It is not the point to turn hate to love. They are made from the same fabric and exist as a reversal of each other, an hainamoration, as Lacan called it, a hateloving, like the two sides on the Möbius strip, which are in fact one and the same side. Love follows hate and covers it in a Marranos effect. We are all Marranos. Lacan’s invention appears consistent with Freud’s ambivalence. There is no father to dismantle this paradox.
Let’s say that hatred starts with unfinished mourning. We hate the Other for having left us with a sense of loss of the loved one and with the lack that will remain. To deny this lack amounts in effect to denying the fault in the Other. To hate the Other is to deny the inconsistency and fallibility of the Other to guarantee subject’s existence. In the end, when the subject is left alone with a loss by the Other and with the latter’s insufficiency and inconsistency, these modes of forced detachment form different and un-mourned contributions to hatred, as they spill over the disagreeable fault and swing towards love to make the Other consist by idealising it and believing its promises to be fulfilled. In short, hatred is a failure of mourning. In effect, there is a failure to fill the void in the subject. What I have called hatred here is the point of excess that exceeds the pendulum of hateloving. To achieve the nonhuman and to close the gap will always be doomed to failure. How can we allow for this disturbing paradox to be civilised? Not to quantify it or arm it with regression to aggressivity but to humanise it. Hate, not hatred, is a new knot with a real love, a knot tied up not without the fault in the Other. Each knot, father’s or son’s, is then left to its own solitude, without allies. Freud knew well that no object can fill in that solitude, and for Lacan the work of mourning continues to the end9.
That’s why there are no just wars or just obliterations of people, children, or nations. Nor is there a just dehumanisation of speaking beings. We have instead a justification of the failure of mourning and of the denial of inconsistency of the Other, replaced with a belief in a supremacy of one people over another, which does not change the fact that the most diligent war mongers remain the biggest bigots of the unconscious. That’s how the analyst discourse works at war – first as a denial of the lost object I am for the Other, then as a hate of the Other for having opened my lack, then as a reversal of that denial, i.e. as the master discourse that harbours the un-mourned passion. It reveals the obscene jouissance in front of which, in the age of shamelessness, we still feel ashamed.
1 Schmitt, C., Political Theology, trans. G. Schwab, University Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005.
2 Freud, S., “Thoughts for the times of war and death”, 1915, trans. J. Strachey, SE Vol. 13, The Hogarth Press, London, 1955.
3 Freud, S., “Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia, and homosexuality”, 1922, trans. J. Strachey, SE Vol. 18, The Hogarth Press, London, 1955.
4 Miller, J.-A., “A fantasy”, trans. T. Sowly, rev. M. Julien, Psychoanalytical Notebooks Nr 34, London, 2019.
7 Ibid.
8 https://laregledujeu.org/2026/03/09/47710/la-guerre-en-iran-est-juste/
9 Lacan, J., D’écolage, Aux Confins du Séminaire, ed. J.-A. Miller, Navarin éditeur, Paris, 2021.