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Askew, Gregory R.

English

2006

MA

This thesis examines the American discourse of victimhood (DOV) through Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. I am primarily concerned with the degree to which those who assume the identity offered by this discursive position participate in and perpetuate the real or imagined conditions of their victimization. I argue that self-identified victims become psychically invested in this particular identity construct, deriving not only a paradoxical degree of enjoyment but also, more radically, a greater purchase on meaning at a time frequently characterized by meaning's fundamental decentered-ness. The ontological character of this investment suggests a "passionate attachment" that might ultimately amount to a de facto reinforcing of the real relations of power. The DOV entails a reality construct that may effectively operate the same as any "real" system of oppression: invested in a discourse that posits a vigilantly policed horizon of possibility, the subject turns away from any action that would test the limits of his or her oppression and consequently the terms of his or her symbolic existence. Since the discourse of victimhood's current prevalence exceeds the traditional dividing lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religous affiliation, I claim that a more universal condition at the heart of American experience must be identified to account for its ubiquity. I contend that, in fact, pan-cultural anxiety, resulting from the ever-increasing hegemony of consumer capitalism through the twentieth century, ultimately informs the appeal of this discursive position. This anxiety, as I further argue, is ontological in nature: a diffuse affective state born out of the destabilization of the symbolic matrix in which we ground a sense of being in the world. The DOV provides a degree of stability in the general order of meaning and thereby alleviates the sense of anxiety. A subject, cast into anxious-uncertainty as to his relation to the symbolic order, the sum total of relations and the terms that govern them, turns to the DOV as an nominal source of certainty and an explanation for the acute discontent that anxiety provokes.
I proceed with an analysis of how the DOV manifests certain psychic structures and attitudes that are always, on a fundamental level, a response to anxiety, part of our varied psychic modes of defense against that which threatens the false totalities of ego and ideology. If our time has been accurately diagnosed as the "decline of Oedipus," the general breakdown of the symbolic Law and the Masters historically summoned to reinforce its legtimacy, then the DOV, I argue, functions as a paradoxical re-invoking of an absolute master as oppressor, whose figural presence holds together a symbolic framework that provides the subject with a relatively stable sense of identity and a reason for his or her perpetual sense of dissatisfaction. This discourse, I claim, thus nonreflectively engages in what Lacan sees as the paradox of Law and desire, a dialectical relationship in which fantasy plays a vital auxiliary role. The subject's desire is sustained by the fantasy of a master whose shadow-law denies the complete fulfillment of the subject's desire, a satisfaction that, according to Lacan, is always-already impossible. Thus the Master's law maintains the illusion of such fulfillment. The subsequent discussions further analyze the function of an imagined master figure in the DOV in terms of envy and paranoia, two closely related modes of "misrecognition" that operate to maintain the discourse of victimhood's particular reality construct. I conclude with further consideration of the costs involved when one invests themselves in the discourse of victimhood and follow with a few exploratory responses to the perennial question of 'What to do?'.