A Cure for the Incels: Preliminary Notes

I theorize about the incels, but how can one treat them? This is among the most frequently asked questions on the subject.

First, there can be no single, universal method because the practical approach needs to be based on each individual, rather than trying to fit the individual into a preconceived set of answers. There’s not really a single therapeutic method—even within the Lacanian psychoanalytic field the incel can be both a neurotic and a psychotic, which would entail very different approaches in the clinic. (The difference between a neurotic and a psychotic and its relevance in the clinical context is handled in more detail in Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding Part 1.) Not to mention the very different ways that cognitive-behavioral theorists, evolutionary psychologists, and so on, would frame their conception of the incel, and thus of their conception of a possible cure. I will not go in great detail on those because, to my knowledge, no one in those fields has provided insight into the incels with any real depth. In fact, the fragmented and inadequate science of the incels, the dismal science that affirms their hopelessness and the general cruelty of the world (as can be seen on the Incels Wiki) tends to come from insights gathered from these fields.

Second, many incels will grow out of being incel. For many, it really is only a phase—for these sorts it can be seen alongside other, often harmless, forms of “youthful alienation,” and it is especially in this light that we can speak of a “poetry” of the incels: perhaps such that an “incel period” in a poet’s life would be their tumultuous early work, from which they emerge with a serene, stoic new sobriety, or for another kind of poet it would be a morose and somber “blue period” that transforms into cubist experimentation.

And even though there are many that may never grow out of it, inceldom should not be thought of as only a terminal condition, as many mental illnesses have come to be understood. This is the trap that is set by attempts to reclaim mental illnesses as constitutive of positive “neurodivergent” identities, whereby the subject enjoys their symptom and in doing so gives up on any attempt to overcome the impasses in their desire, effectively giving up on, or suspending, their desire. This suspension of desire takes form in, for example, the “depressed” identity in vogue among today’s youth—the subject has depression and will have depression forever, all attempts to work through this must do so without abandoning that crutch, positively embracing this condition is seen as a positive act, or even a revolutionary political one. Embracing one’s own misery should not be seen as liberation.

But what does a “cure” even mean?

Is the goal of the cure to normalize the subject to their surroundings? For the incels to adapt themselves to the inescapable tyranny of bourgeois family life and gender roles, a tyranny that is nonetheless preferable to the anarchy of its absence? This is the “Freudian” position. But to some extent, wouldn’t this normalization, this adaptation of the incel-animal to conform to his social environment, mean a “doubling-down” on the mad logic of inceldom, which is none other than the “normal” logic of our patriarchal-bourgeois-capitalist-consumerist society without any polite or ironic distance from its unpleasant truth? That is, that the logic of inceldom is the logic of our society stripped of all its innuendo and doublethink, rendered completely literal and “autistic”? The Law of paternal authority, but autistic, and demanding nothing short of patriarchal omnipotence. For the incel to fit into normal society, in this sense, they would continue to be incels, but “ascended” (their term). They would be incels that fuck. They would not be cured, because their desire is not simply contained in fucking. If anything they would be worse off, because now they would have to face the insurmountable otherness of the woman in her naked immediacy, which before, in their loneliness, was mercifully distant.

The cure needs to have both some adherence to the structure of “the Law,” the “Name-of-the-Father,” while not forgetting about the subject who, despite being prey to the structures of the unconscious, manages to not give up on his desire. The cure must be truly “emancipatory.” The political implications of this should be obvious, but one should be careful not to reduce the incel and the incel cure to a particular political programme.

For Lacan, analysis does not have as its final aim a “recovery;” it should lead to a real point where the subject can lift himself back up and live again. Lacan’s own definition of the cure to “raise impotence to the impossible.” The analysis is to unblock a situation that is initially experienced by the analysand as an impotence, so that it leads to a real point where the subject, bogged down in the imaginary, can once again recover some of its powers of symbolization. (Here I have been paraphrasing Badiou in his conversation with Roudinesco.) The curative act remains intelligible from the point of view of the form, the point of view of the structures of the unconscious. The goal for the incel in analysis should therefore be to bring the subject to the real point where they are able to “remove the impasses in their desire.” Whatever that goes on to look like, it should mean a clear break from the emphasis on pure “normalization.”

For better or for worse, the role of the analyst is nothing like what it was in the time of either Freud or Lacan. This is especially true in the United States, where Freud, Lacan, and psychoanalysis have almost no legitimacy in the medical institutions of contemporary psychology. It will no doubt be necessary to think of the psychoanalytic cure outside the context of the psychoanalytic clinic, not least of all for economic reasons. It goes without saying that the incels will sooner watch the videos of Jordan Peterson (and even pay the subscription fees for his services) than pay hundreds of dollars a session to see the rare Lacanian analyst that is up-to-date enough to help them.

Talking Badiou, Borders, and Bernie

I’ve been getting more interested in Badiou lately—I bought and have been reading “Theory of the Subject,” casually, or at least as casually as one can read such a book. What is good about Badiou is that he offers a real revolutionary lucidity; he doesn’t get led astray in the sense that the so-called “crypto-fascist” leftists do, the leftists who always happen to find themselves on the Right whenever it counts (there is, of course, often still something of value in those “crypto-fascists” like Zizek). Badiou always tries to stay faithful to the Event, the instance of collective liberation that establishes the Truth of radical egalitarian politics. If Badiou is “bad” it is because he is too committed to this, the “unrepentant Maoist.” Whatever my thoughts on the Cultural Revolution, I think this is refreshing.

Badiou’s history of work with migrant workers and marginalized populations is particularly relevant today. In the Verso Blog (as always):

Faced with the refugee problem, the left is deeply divided between NPA-style internationalism and the protectionism defended by Chantal Mouffe or La France Insoumise. What is your position?

Today, it is impossible to consider any major political problem except on the world scale. The consequences to be drawn from an organizational point of view are another matter… If you do not focus on this level, you cannot understand the situation. It is not completely wrong to say that there are no more manual workers in France. At the world level, on the other hand, there have never been so many workers as there are now. Simply that they are all in China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Brazil or Romania. We seriously misinterpret the political and social situation, in the broadest sense, by seeing it only through the French keyhole. Forty years ago, in this country, there was a complete social fabric, with peasants and workers in large factories. The changes of globalized capitalism force us to change our thinking accordingly. If you don’t have the same measure as your opponent, you’re bound to fail! Today’s proletariat is a vast nomadic proletariat seen as immigration or migrants. In reality, this is a question of class relations at the planetary level. This implies, at a minimum, prioritizing international relations and having a position on this nomadic proletariat that arrives in our country or wants to settle there. I like these divisive questions! Those on which there’s a consensus are rarely the right ones. This is the major political issue that divides, in a confusing way. Positions on the left are unclear. After all, what would an organization of the nomadic proletariat mean? We are far from having solved this problem. But you have to raise it. The strategic political stage is global. On this point, capitalism is a good step ahead because it is comfortably established on this stage.

I’ve written before about how socialist electoral politics faces an impasse with the issue of this nomadic proletariat. For the democratic socialists taking power in a country such as the United States requires, at the very least, winning over the existing “settler” working classes—the working classes that were long satisfied with the post-WW2 semblance of endless plenty, the classes who were invited into a way of life that resembled the rich and bourgeois classes but forced back out once their labor was no longer the most cost-effective option, the classes on the internal periphery of the core of capital, the dispossessed white blue-collar Trump voters archetype we have heard so much about. Carrying the torch of American social democratic politics, Bernie Sanders must speak for these people if he wishes to be elected president; he must, per Zizek, consider the jouissance that obstructs the “coming-together” of the dispossessed Rust Belt worker with the Other of the undocumented nomadic proletarian of Central America, the outsider from the external periphery, beyond the polis. The insistence that there is no impasse or tension whatsoever between these different groups is false.  This is not to say that Sanders must be racist, in the crass or vulgar sense, but it almost certainly means that he must leave some racist institutional structures unquestioned.

Let me put this another way: the total abolition of borders, the unconditional affirmation of the principle of absolute freedom of movement, and so on, is not a promising electoral strategy because it offers little to the people who will vote. (I will not specify the abolition of ICE in particular because that refers to the inhumane practices of the agency and not necessarily the theoretical stance of “no borders” overall.) Even if the nomadic proletarians do not steal the jobs and enjoyment of the dispossessed citizen-settlers as much as the nativist reactionaries claim, the impression, the popular mood, is what counts. The people Sanders must win over will not vote for him if the electoral socialist left’s messaging is that they (the citizen-settlers) are seen simply as white devil petit bourgeois class enemies—even if they really are.

(I am speaking of collectives, of myths, essentially. The “Trump voter” identity is the silliest myth of all. But we must use these broad strokes because we don’t have a discrete subject we can talk to, as in psychoanalysis. Instead, we have a sort of necessarily-inadequate aggregate nebula of moods.)

The woke-PC democratic socialists are right to say that these dispossessed Trump voters aren’t really the “proletariat” in the grand scheme of things. And to turn back to Badiou, “it is impossible to consider any major political problem except on the world scale.” But the very next sentence: “The consequences to be drawn from an organizational point of view are another matter…”

The abolition of borders is impossible in the context of a democratic electoral program that maintains continuity with the existing order. If we want to organize the nomadic proletariat we need to think outside of electoral politics, outside the nation-state—we must think in terms of international relations.

This impasse is something that polite democratic socialists do not want to accept exists. Either they must identify with democracy, the nation-state, the parliamentary status quo, and work with the settler classes or they must reject electoral politics entirely and side with the nomadic proletariat, taking the path of revolutionary politics and effectively ceasing to be American (“Amerikkkan”). The latter option is the real rejection of identity politics since its goal is the end of identity, full stop.

What this ultimately comes back to is a question of what the Left should be trying to achieve, the organizational question. A Sanders presidency—a best-case scenario for the DSA faction—would by definition maintain continuity with the status quo, sanctioned by authority of the Constitution written by all those slave owners, and whatever. It would not be Communist. But that isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be better than what things are now. I will leave this question hanging here. The DSA faction will only trip over itself if it thinks it can legislate its way to revolutionary politics and abolishing the nation-state. If we just want some of the “nice things” that social democratic Europeans get to have, then we can skip the revolution—but we have to beat the imperialist bourgeoisie at their own electoral game. Is it worth it?