PhantomAid is a project in the overlapping fields of social philosophy and political theory. Its topic is the recent global rise in right-wing populism. As a theoretical project, PhantomAiD asks about the frameworks we use to explain and analyze these political trends. To give an example of such frameworks: in an economistic framework, one would look at income levels and job precarity to find correlations with the increasing susceptibility for authoritarian politics. Another approach would be to say that many people simply already hold the prejudices – racist and sexist views, for instance – which leaders such as Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro advocate. Neither framework arrives at satisfying analyses. Often it is not the most dispossessed who opt for authoritarianism, and the preexisting prejudices do not explain why those views suddenly become politically mobilizing.
To arrive at a deeper understanding of the authoritarian surge, PhantomAiD suggests a theoretical framework which integrates materialist and psychological explanations. Its core is the novel concept of “phantom possession”. Phantom possession refers to the entitlement that some groups hold over others. This entitlement is both historically entrenched and politically vacuous. It was shaped in certain historical institutions of social domination, such as patriarchal marriage (where the husband owns the reproductive labour of his wife) or chattel slavery (where white planters owned enslaved Black people). With emancipation and abolitions, those institutions have ceased to exist. Nevertheless, the identities shaped within them partly endure. They endure, like phantom pain in the place of a lost limb, as differential dispositions to appropriate or to be appropriated. Neo-authoritarianism, unlike older forms with their collective focus on leadership and discipline, revolves around the defense of such individual entitlements.
To explain, in turn, where this attitude of the “phantom-owner” comes from, the project turns to two different sources. One is early modern political theory, most notably that of Thomas Hobbes, to show – in the line of an interpretation first offered by Hannah Arendt – how modern politics is tied to a destructive form of ownership. The political subject is he who owns himself. Where Arendt focuses on the accumulative drive of the possessive individual, PhantomAiD highlights the abusive tendency licensed by the specifically modern understanding of ownership as full dominion. The second source is psychoanalysis. PhantomAiD picks up the older attempts in Critical Theory (by Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm) to identify a particular personality structure prone to authoritarianism. The project confirmed the hypothesis that the character seeking to resolve his dilemmas in supremacist politics is best understood as “phantom owner”. Different structures of psychological defense mechanisms – obsessive, hysterical, and narcissist prejudices – can be shown to stabilize the inherently unstable figure of the self-owning subject, a subject which always needs an outer domain to exert its sovereignty over and experience its entitlement as “freedom”.
PhantomAiD traced the journey of an economic relation – ownership – through modern identities into contemporary politics, offering tools to specialists and citizen alike to analyze our situation.
