We Are All Outsiders

Unconscious Freedom

Approximately one month before the 2024 presidential election in the United States, my colleague Jean-Thomas Tremblay and I participated in a Q&A hosted by the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. The event centered on our coauthored book, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, and the questions from the audience followed the book’s investigations into the negative dimensions of sex, subjectivity, ecology, and film.11 There were questions about the current state of theory, the craft of coauthorship, and praxis: What is to be done? Finally, we were asked about freedom and where freedom operates (if at all) in our thinking. We answered, taking turns, and were about to conclude before I recalled, or perhaps unconsciously willed our return to, the final question: What about freedom? I reached for the microphone and gave my answer: “What we call negative life or the negativity of the unconscious is freedom.” It was a hasty answer lacking nuance, but I said it. In other words, freedom is the freedom of the unconscious. What could this mean?

I confess I wasn’t sure at the time. Later, on the drive home from Toronto, my partner asked me: “What were you trying to say? I mean, doesn’t unconscious freedom or whatever amount to another kind of liberalism?” She wasn’t wrong. The notion that we are voluntary actors, free to think and do as we please, is, of course, a liberal fantasy that overlooks the structuring role of language, culture, biology, the economy, and so on. Because of its association with liberalism and the failures of liberal democracy, freedom has become an outmoded term: at best naïve, at worst, dangerous. What was I on about?

My coauthor was similarly perplexed.12 While it is true that one of the pleasures of coauthoring is learning you can still surprise each other, this surprise may have been too much. “No,” they said. “Not freedom. It can’t be freedom.” I had betrayed my collaborator’s confidence by speaking of unconscious freedom. Worse still, I had made a conceptual error, forgetting that there can be no freedom where there is the unconscious. Yes, I had stepped in it. One could even say that I proved my coauthor’s point by electing to say a stupidity that contradicts our book’s argument about the undermining role of the unconscious. I spoke freely, and my speaking got the better of me. Of course, I have been writing and speaking publicly for some time and have learned that being wrong is part of the job. I decided I had erred, and I let it go.

On that same trip to Toronto, I stopped at a bookstore devoted almost entirely to psychoanalysis. There you can read Freud, Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and so on. I was in heaven. Although I needed to be thrifty, traveling as I was on an academic budget, I spotted a book by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, whom I had read about but never read directly. The book I chose is called Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience. I took pleasure in the title, a not-so-subtle nod to the psychopathologies of everyday life, of which I am familiar. I flipped through the book’s first few pages, landing on these sentences:

Through the method of psychoanalysis, Freud gave the analysand a place to present his dream in the presence of another person and a formal method of dissemination. Whatever important truths were found in a psychoanalysis that would facilitate a cure of symptoms and pathological structures, exercising this unconscious freedom in the presence of the other was deeply curative in its own right.13

I read these sentences a few times, asking myself: What is this “unconscious freedom”? I was hooked, determined to find out. When I went to purchase the book, the cashier said, “Christopher Bollas. Nice! We’ve been selling a lot of Bollas these days,” as if he were a condiment or shoe. I was amused and self-conscious about being part of a trend. Above all, I felt I had entered a scene from the film High Fidelity (2000), learning what’s hip and what’s not in the world of psychoanalytic theory.14 I played my part, acting the bemused know-nothing, paid, and left. Later, I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if more people were reading Bollas? What’s driving this choice?

I do not have data proving interest in Christopher Bollas’s thought. However, I would like to think that, if there is a trend toward Bollas, it has something to do with his term and concept “unconscious freedom.”

Driving home from Toronto, my partner said to me, “Hey, we should watch Election. Have you seen it?” I had not. “It’s hilarious. It could be a good way to mentally prepare for the election in November, you know, when the Dems get crushed like the losers they are.”

It had been roughly a year since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault, and the Biden administration was still footing the bill for the destruction of Palestinian life. Nothing has changed regarding the United States’ support of Israel despite widespread opposition from US citizens. The Democratic Party’s commitment to the slaughter of Palestinian men, women, and children is, in retrospect, a disturbing reminder of Biden’s promise to his wealthy donors in 2020: “Nothing will change.” He kept his word. He kept his word insofar as the Democrats and the liberal ideology they represent stand for nothing but the freedom of corporations (weapons manufacturers, tech companies, and the fossil fuel industry), no matter the cost to human life. In this respect, a vote for Kamala Harris meant a vote for the status quo, for continued bloodshed, and for the ongoing class warfare that is ravaging this country, ensuring that the rich get richer while the rest of us go broke.

Our anger heading into the US election had much to do with our lack of freedom. Voting felt like a charade. The choice between liberal capitalism (Harris) and authoritarian capitalism (Trump) was a losing alternative. Both choices guarantee genocide.

Suffice it to say, we needed a laugh. I wasn’t familiar with the comedy Election (1999), but it struck me as a good place to begin thinking about the failures of liberal democracy.15 What I hadn’t expected, and what the film proved helpful for, was its thinking about unconscious freedom. The film shows that unconscious freedom and loss go hand in hand. My partner was on to something when she called the Democrats “losers.” After watching Election, I began to think that they lost so miserably in 2024 because they did not elect their unconscious freedom, that is, the freedom to lose face.

Destined to Fail

Election is about ambitious, overachieving high schooler Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), who runs unopposed for student government president in her high school’s election. Flick seems destined for success (she says so in the film’s voice-over narration) until her US history and civics teacher, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), interferes. Jim persuades the high school’s most popular student, Paul Metzler (Chris Klein), a football player with no political ambition, to run for student government president. Paul is Jim’s pawn, his puppet in the school election. Even at the high school level, the election functions as an index of the popular belief in democratic freedom: the freedom to run, to debate ideas, and to cast one’s vote.

Jim’s personal life feels less free, by contrast. He is frustrated by his marital life and inability to conceive a child with his wife, Diane McAllister (Molly Hagan). He’s vexed by the star student Tracy, who seems all but destined to surpass him in every social regard (professional success, wealth, recognition) and who had a short, highly inappropriate sexual relationship with his friend and colleague, Dave Novotny (Mark Harelik), a geometry teacher. Moreover, Jim desires his friend’s ex-wife, Linda Novotny (Delaney Driscoll), whom he tries to seduce, leading to his divorce. To compensate for his inadequacy, Jim does everything he can to derail Tracy’s destiny. He recruits the opposition, Paul; he falsifies the election count and accuses Tracy of vandalism. As it happens, Tracy was responsible. She destroyed her opponents’ campaign posters in a burst of rage mixed with pleasure. However, that is of little consequence. Jim’s mission was to thwart Tracy before she committed any wrongdoing. He did everything he could to stand in the way of her freedom while destroying his life in the process.

By the end of the film, Jim has lost his wife due to his infidelity; he has lost his lover, Linda, who no longer wants anything to do with him; and he has lost his job and his home. He has lost everything—everything except his car. Even that becomes a loss when he moves to New York City, where having a car is impractical. He works as an educational tour guide at the New York Natural History Museum, a position reminiscent of his previous job as a high school teacher but also sufficiently dissimilar to measure the distance between his old life and his new one. That, too, can be a loss, the gap between old and new. Moreover, he lectures about extinct, taxidermized species, shells of their former life, suggesting that he too is such a shell, a living dead thing.

Election is about the subversion of the democratic process. Yet, it is also a film about human desire, not only in the aspirational sense but also in its self-destructive register. We can, too cleanly, but nonetheless informatively, distinguish between desire as a wish, which can be conscious, such as the wish for a successful career or satisfying relationship, and what Freud calls the drive, which operates unconsciously against our will by subverting our conscious intentions. The latter is what Christopher Bollas has in mind when he speaks of unconscious freedom; it is, if we can put it this way, freedom without freedom, and thus utterly contrary to the history of philosophical writing on freedom. To take one significant example, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza defines freedom as the freedom to persist in one’s desire. Freud and Spinoza might agree about desire, what it is, and how it functions. However, Freud’s theory puts a significant twist on the philosophy of freedom when he theorizes the drive, which contradicts our desire and persistence. Freud’s drive theory throws into relief how unfree we actually are. It is as if, according to Freud, we are all the time running on tracks, proceeding according to our desire, thinking we know where we are going and why, while, in truth, we have jumped the tracks and are heading who knows where. In this restricted sense of the word freedom as the desire to follow one’s will, Freud is not a fellow traveler. He is closer to Tracy Flick, who believes in destiny, the destiny of her success. Freud’s destiny is not that, unless by success we mean a successful subversion. His is a unique way of thinking about destiny, which puts destiny on the side of the drive. We are destined, Freud thinks, to replay our unconscious fixations, no matter the cost to our conscious, supposedly free lives. The unconscious is not ours to will or direct; we do not choose where or how the unconscious will play out. According to Freud, the die is cast in a certain sense; we are destined to repeat our traumata, though how we repeat them is up to us.

Election has much to say about thwarted desires and stifled freedoms and supports a critical attitude that might dismiss freedom as a fantasy, a bourgeois luxury, or a privilege of the white and wealthy. Freedom in the film is not what it was for the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who were famous for saying that existence is free—it is a terrible freedom, but free—and that “existence precedes essence.”16 These words are less persuasive now, and perhaps for good reason. There is nothing in the political landscape today to suggest that we suffer from our terrible freedom; on the contrary, we suffer from the planned obsolescence of labor, the environment, cities, schools, healthcare, and government. We would be justified in saying, “Fuck your freedom, Sartre,” or “Whatever, boomer; I’ll be free after I pay off my student debt.” I have not even mentioned the enormous problem of unfreedom resulting from mass incarceration. Nor have I addressed the curtailing of reproductive freedoms and gender-affirming care in the United States. Unfreedom is the constant condition of life under capitalism, even for the capitalist, who may not suffer from exploitation but who is still unfree so long as they are dependent on the exploitation of others.

Election is right to make a mockery of our so-called freedoms, which feel especially fragile with Donald Trump in office. However, the film also highlights a different kind of freedom, what Bollas calls “unconscious freedom.” I have already committed to saying that the unconscious is destiny. It is why the likes of Sartre or your average liberal cannot stomach Freud. If you believe in free will and, furthermore, that your freedoms are enhanced by the democratic process, with adjustments here and there, adding or curtailing this or that freedom from election to election, then you will never see Freud as more than a troublemaker. In a sense, that is right. Freud troubled our notion of free will and self-certainty. After Freud, one must choose: either I pretend psychoanalysis never happened and go on believing in the sovereign individual or I accept my fate as an unconscious subject acting at cross-purposes. Tracy Flick was not wrong when she spoke of “destiny.” Her destiny wasn’t exactly what she desired or willed, however. Her destiny came when she subverted her desire, destroying her opponent’s campaign posters, an act that almost cost her the election. It came when Jim cheated on his wife with her best friend, costing him his marriage, home, and self-respect, and when he falsified the election results in order to sabotage Tracy, his student. However, he only sabotaged himself, and Tracy and Jim have that in common. They are comrades in self-destruction who know without knowing that the only way to win is to lose.

Self-Destruct

When I spoke about freedom that day in October, I did not quite know what I was saying and was not sure why I was saying it. I have read Karl Marx. I have read Foucault. I understand that freedom no longer has the cachet it once did.17 Reading Bollas, however, I started thinking about a different kind of freedom, closer to what Freud means by unconscious destiny. The two terms are at odds. Yet, that contradiction is part of what Bollas is getting at when he writes about “unconscious freedom,” which is, if I were to put it simply, the freedom of the unconscious to act against our will.

Let us return to Jim McAllister and his inexplicable desire to derail Tracy’s campaign for student government president. What was it that compelled him to act so irresponsibly, so foolishly? Envy, maybe, of an outstanding student destined for big things. Concern, perhaps, for the democratic process. He tells Paul, the high school football star and hunk, that it wouldn’t be right, nor would it be good for democracy, if Tracy ran unopposed. Something about Tracy’s aspirations and the lack of a barrier to those aspirations irks Jim for reasons the film leaves us to examine. My take is that it is Tracy’s enthusiasm, better still, her enjoyment, and not any particular aspiration she articulates, that upsets Jim. Tracy enjoys her successes in a way that disturbs Jim profoundly. Although Tracy is a model student and can easily and convincingly define the difference between ethics and morality, a question Jim poses to his civics class, she clearly enjoys in excess of her civic duty. Her persistence in the classroom, raising her hand high and energetically despite her teacher’s efforts to ignore her, demonstrates how much she relishes being right, perhaps even more so in the face of her teacher’s blatant obstruction of her will.

Moreover, when we learn of Tracy’s affair with her geometry teacher, Dave, Jim’s friend, we hear in flashback how much she enjoyed conversing with Dave, whom she saw as an equal, her only equal in the school, never mind their age difference and the illegality of their sexual relationship. For someone who likes to insist on the rule of law, especially in the wind-up to the election, Tracy has no problem with breaking the law or the school’s code of conduct to sleep with a married man. The same is true of Dave, and much more damning, given his age and professional role. He does not see what he is doing as statutory rape; he sees it as liberating, freeing for him and Tracy both. Tracy and Dave see each other as free, consenting individuals, but beyond their so-called free consent, they enjoy their sexual misconduct. They enjoy it excessively.

Tracy enjoys bending the rules to suit her interests. At one point, Dave confides to Jim, “You wouldn’t believe how wet she [Tracy] gets,” a vulgar statement, especially coming from her teacher, but also clearly a brag. Tracy’s sexual enjoyment, which Dave reads as wetness, is tied to her transgression. On the one hand, we can read her transgression as her pursuing her will wherever it takes her. On the other hand, her enjoyment seems much more the result of the threat to her self-interest that breaking the law and sleeping with her teacher represents. That is why Tracy’s greatest release in the film, in which she is otherwise bottled up, comes when she suddenly and surprisingly destroys her opponents’ campaign posters. This unexpected burst of enjoyment, of ecstasy, results in her almost losing the contest. Thus, for Tracy, her enjoyment has nothing to do with the object of her will, be it the school election, her teacher-turned-lover, or her future aspirations, and everything to do with the barrier to her self-interest that these objects produce. She is drawn to what almost undoes her.

Jim detects her enjoyment, and he’s repulsed by it, not simply because he fears it (this is what he consciously tells himself, that he is standing in Tracy’s way because he fears the threat she poses to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and high school elections) but because he enjoys excessively too. He fears in external form what he harbors inwardly, an enjoyment at odds with his self-image and all his lectures on civic-minded duty. What kind of enjoyment could he possibly derive from Tracy, whom he abhors? Quite simply, he enjoys the obstacle that Tracy poses to his and others’ supposed happiness. Tracy enacts what Jim teaches. She’s engaged. She knows the issues. She wants to make a difference. And yet, her political enjoyment throws a wrench in Jim’s notion of a morally and ethically upstanding individual. Her unconscious freedom contradicts freedom as he knows and teaches it. Tracy’s sexual affair with his friend transgresses professional and moral boundaries, damaging not only his friend’s life and career (though it is the friend’s responsibility and not Tracy’s) but also his. Jim no sooner hears about Tracy and Dave than he starts fantasizing about sleeping with Tracy. The latter puts into relief the lack of enjoyment he derives from his marriage and the difficulty of trying but being unable to conceive a child. In fact, it is not clear that Jim enjoys anything. He seems comfortably indifferent to his wife and unenthusiastic about starting a family. It is only when Tracy creates an obstacle to his marriage that Jim begins his sexual fantasies. These fantasies include watching high school–themed pornography in his basement while his wife sleeps. This pornography features, surprise, a high school football player and a young woman who looks like Tracy. Jim concocts the plan to enlist Paul the next morning. His other fantasy includes his friend’s ex-wife, Linda, whom he befriends and hopes to seduce. They have sex once, and Jim hopes to continue the affair until Linda abruptly ends it, confessing to Jim’s wife, who divorces him.

What do these fantasies have in common? Both are stirred by Tracy, specifically Tracy’s threat. As soon as he becomes convinced that her enjoyment poses a threat, he begins acting excessively himself. Her enjoyment activates his enjoyment. The difference is that his enjoyment depends on the obstacle that Tracy represents. Her excessiveness cuts against his teaching and self-image as a good, virtuous, morally upstanding teacher, friend, and family man. He cannot tolerate the idea that he is aroused by these perceived losses and so turns to fantasy instead to live those losses differently. Tracy excites Jim because she creates a barrier to his freedom; she represents a kind of unfreedom and that barrier causes Jim’s enjoyment. Put simply, he enjoys the absence that Tracy produces, and that his fantasies produce, and not any particular object. He enjoys his unconscious freedom, which is always the freedom to lose face, at the expense of his conscious freedoms.

This act of losing is what the two fantasies have in common. Paul is a high school football player and the most popular student in school. However, he injured his leg, ruining whatever chance he had at a football career. Moreover, his popularity largely owes to his father’s money, which enables him to throw lavish parties. In other words, nothing that makes Paul “Paul” is intrinsic to him. Likewise, Linda is beautiful, alluring, and caring, and she shows that she is the better person in the end by confessing her misdeed to Jim’s wife. Yet, what makes her suddenly so irresistible to Jim is that her life has been devastated by Tracy. Linda and Paul, insofar as he stands to lose to Tracy in the election, are on the losing side of Tracy’s excess and thus act as proxies for Jim’s desire, which is not the desire for Tracy but for the damage that Tracy inflicts. Linda and Paul are damaged people, and Jim is drawn to them for that reason. He relates to their loss; he’s also aroused by it. Unconsciously, he wants to be like Paul and Linda; he wants what almost destroys him.

Hating Tracy is a convenient way for Jim to live his unconscious freedom, that is, the freedom of the drive, which, as we have defined it, is freedom without freedom. Tracy becomes a convenient prop, the external embodiment of Jim’s own drive to self-destruction. Instead of confronting his internal masochism, which is how Freud defines the drive, he externalizes it onto Tracy as an oppositional threat. This way, he avoids confronting his unconscious freedom by turning it into an excessive other, Tracy, who curbs his conscious will. This excessive other allows Jim to sustain his masochism, his unconscious freedom, in the form of an outside threat to freedom: the other who enjoys too much, who enjoys lubriciously.

Election is about the slippery underside of freedom, which goes beyond individual actors to what Bollas considers a universal freedom to thwart our conscious intentions. The unconscious can easily appear as the site of a universal unfreedom because it is, as Jim experiences it, an obstacle to our conscious pursuits, including the pursuit of happiness. I asked my partner, after watching the film together, “How do you interpret the ending? It’s ambiguous whether it’s a happy ending.” Indeed, it is. Jim loses his wife, the child they were trying for, and his job, and he moves to New York City, where he lives in a basement apartment, which sucks, and works as a tour guide among taxidermies. He says he’s happy and that it all worked out for the better. My partner noted, “Well, he lives in a basement. The basement is always the spatial equivalent of the unconscious, don’t you think?” It certainly can be. She added: “It’s never clear what Jim desires. He’s sort of a shell for other people’s desires. Working around stuffed animals is kind of apropos. So, maybe he is happy in a weird way.” Neither of us thinks that happiness is a useful measure of a film or that it even exists. What is happiness? Isn’t it just a memory we have of being happy?

However, thinking of Jim as satisfied, if not happy, is instructive. What makes the drive so disturbing is the idea that something in us that is not us is enjoying at our expense. This enjoyment is what Freud means by the primary masochism of the drive. The drive is this autonomous satisfaction that gets off by causing us dissatisfaction. From this perspective, and taking the idea that the basement is the physical representation of the unconscious and the natural history museum the strange place where dead things live uncannily in fixed poses, it is not too much of a stretch to say that Jim inhabits his unconscious freedom in the end, a freedom that looks like a repetition, a destiny not too dissimilar to what he had before, but different. Jim’s unconscious freedom brought him to this point where all is lost and a new repetition is underway. Perhaps all we can choose freely is this self-destructive freedom, either to elect or disavow it.

I am oversimplifying Bollas’s notion and what we might call the ethics of psychoanalysis, which is to orient oneself to one’s self-destructiveness, the only freedom that psychoanalysis knows. Even the film Election complicates the choice between election or disavowal, which places too much on the side of consciousness and free will. While the ending does suggest that Jim has accepted his unconscious destiny and let go of his antipathy toward Tracy, this rosy picture shatters as soon as Tracy reenters the picture. Jim goes to Washington, DC, on a work trip. He goes there to reflect on and enjoy his enshrined freedoms. While out for a stroll, he sees Tracy, now an adult and politician, getting into a vehicle accompanied by other politicians. She’s won. Jim’s attempts at thwarting her and saving democracy have failed. Freedom is lost. Or so he thinks.

Jim impulsively, self-destructively throws a milkshake at Tracy Flick’s car, his final volley at the excessive other. The car stops. Security gets out and chases after Jim. He finds himself, once again, in trouble, his stable, balanced life as a tour guide derailed. He finds himself, that is, enjoying his disaster. Flick remains, for him, the object that threatens his stability and thus causes his enjoyment, which the milkshake indicates is senseless and excessive.

It would be fair to ask why anyone should invest time in learning or caring about this freedom that relentlessly undermines our will and, by extension, any political or personal project. What kind of praxis can come from the insatiable motivation to damage our self-interests? In this regard, the existentialists were right. Unconscious freedom is terrible. However, it may not be that implausible to enact after all. Jim and Tracy both externalize their unfreedom by casting it as an outside threat. In that way, they keep unconscious and out of bounds the enjoyment they derive from the external obstacle. Jim flees his unconscious freedom by transposing its undermining excess onto Tracy when, in fact, both are excessive and self-destructive; hence their bond.

But when activists take to the streets, workers collectivize, and individuals throw away their self-interest for love, are these not also expressions of the primary masochism of the drive? Do they not testify to our ability to elect our unconscious freedom by aligning our enjoyment with the potential for and, in some cases, the painful and sacrificial experience of loss?

Jim’s new job is all about loss. He teaches students young and old about natural history and is surrounded by defunct species, harbingers of environmental doom. This marks an important shift. He is no longer teaching students how to act morally or ethically. Instead, he is teaching others about extinction, including unnatural extinctions, about which nothing can be done. They appear, in reverse at least, fated, almost destined. There, Jim comes close, merely a whisker or tusk away from his own destiny as a subject of the drive. I don’t mean to draw a parallel between extinct species and the drive, nor do I wish to compare fossilized species snuffed out by capitalism to destiny. These are noncomparable. However, as figural remainders, the museum animals figure Jim’s repetition of his own self-destructive freedom, which he enacts again by throwing the milkshake. These objects produce a painfully pleasurable absence for Jim (and us) to enjoy.

Enjoy Your Masochism

When the Democratic Party lost the 2024 US presidential election to Donald Trump, many tried to account for the disastrous defeat. Bernie Sanders, one of the few mainstream leftists in US politics, blamed the defeat on the Democrats’ abandonment of the working class and embrace of corporate interests. The party lost the working-class vote, Sanders argued, and that cost them the election. While I do not wish to quibble with Sanders’s assessment, which is undoubtedly true on one level, I can’t help but wonder if his argument misses the root of the problem. Trump is not popular because he creates jobs and a higher standard of living for the working class. He doesn’t. He’s popular because he is Trump.18 Trump enables his supporters to enjoy their unconscious freedom at a remove by positing figures like Tracy Flick, who are imagined to be excessive and threatening to their livelihood and way of life. These figures include immigrants, transgender people, and “woke” teachers, whom they imagine want to steal their jobs, genders, bathrooms, and white nationalist Christian values. Their presence creates an imagined absence, an external threat much like Tracy does for Jim: a way to enjoy our self-destructiveness without owning it. Trump uses their enjoyment to his advantage. For them, Trump is the president of enjoyment, and it doesn’t matter if he’s honest or corrupt or intent on destroying them. In truth, the more he harms his supporters and everyone else, the better. Such is the masochism of enjoyment.

Sanders has been a staunch critic of the Democratic Party’s neoliberal policies. However, the underlying problem is that the Democrats seem unable or unwilling to mobilize the unconscious freedom of their constituents. Doing so would entail cutting against their party’s profitable interests, including fossil fuel companies and weapons manufacturers. Strange as it may seem, the mainstream left must learn to lose in order to win.

True, the Democrats lost quite spectacularly in 2024, ushering in what is sure to be four painful years of fascist rule. However, they did not lose in the sense that I and the film Election are suggesting. The Democrats’ self-destruction and abysmal failure were secondary to their ideological fantasy of preserving the freedom of the market for the ruling elite and their image as defenders of democracy, no matter the genocidal contradictions unfolding in Palestine or the immiseration of workers in the United States. They did not sacrifice their image as the party of the elite. All their talk of right and wrong and saving democracy rang hollow, much like Jim’s civics lesson, not only because it ignored the economic reality of most Americans but also because it ignored the voters’ libidinal attachment to Trump. Indeed, the Democrats, like Jim, routed their enjoyment through the excessive other. What was the Democratic Party’s selling point? We’re not Trump. Trump was their Tracy Flick, the cheat who was threatening to ruin democracy with his excessive enjoyment. Trump produced an obstacle for liberals, but, as for Jim, it was an obstacle that could only be enjoyed at a distance.

There is one character in Election, Paul’s younger sister, Tammy Metzler (Jessica Campbell), who does not buy into the sham election or the empty rhetoric of her teachers. She enters the election for one reason only: to undermine the system. She calls the election a mockery and their freedoms as students a lie and receives resounding applause from her peers despite having no interest in or reverence for the office of student government president, Tracy’s dream. To her, the dream is empty. Freedom is a joke. Tammy does everything in her power to undermine her position, including taking the fall for Tracy’s vandalism. Why?

While Tammy grasps that democracy is an idea, rarely an actuality, and that very little in her life is free, if anything, she, more than anyone else in the film, recognizes the enjoyment that comes from self-destruction. She intuits her unconscious freedom. Specifically, she is a lesbian who intuits her desire to fuck, whatever the cost. Gambling that losing the election and the tolerance of her parents would win her a one-way ticket to the all-girls high school, where she can enjoy excessively, she opts to lose. She wills her self-destruction, coming as close as one can to apprehending the slippery underside of freedom: unconscious freedom.

Tammy’s campaign slogan is simple. Don’t elect her. Elect your self-destruction. Only losers win.

Notes

1. 1. Harmeet Kaur, “Examining the Long History of the ‘Outside Agitator’ Narrative,” CNN, April 29, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/27/us/campus-protests-palestine-outside-agitator-cec/index.html.

2. 2. Amy Julia Harris et al., “Outsiders Were Among Columbia Protestors, but They Dispute Instigating Clashes,” New York Times, May 4, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/nyregion/columbia-protests-arrest-agitators-israel.html.

3. 3. Li Zhou, “The Trope of ‘Outside Agitators’ at Protests, Explained,” Vox, June 3, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21275720/george-floyd-protests-outside-agitators-ferguson-civil-rights-movement.

4. 4. McGowan, Enjoyment Right & Left, 14.

5. 5. Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, “We Need ‘Outside Agitators,’” Jacobin, May 4, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/05/outside-agitators-columbia-palestine-civil-rights.

6. 6. “Joe Biden’s Long History of Pro-Israel Statements,” Middle East Eye, May 21, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Nrv5izaTs.

7. 7. Frédéric Neyrat, ed., Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, https://alienocene.com/.

8. 8. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

9. 9. Bottoms, dir. Emma Seligman (Orion Pictures and Brownstone Productions, 2023).

10. 10. Heathers, dir. Michael Lehmann (New World Pictures and Cinemarque Entertainment, 1989).

11. 11. Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024).

12. 12. Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, “Splitting (A Response),” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, forthcoming.

13. 13. Christopher Bollas, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (Hill and Wang, 1995), 4.

14. 14. High Fidelity, dir. Stephen Frears (Touchstone Pictures, Working Title Films, Dogstar Films, and New Crime Productions, 2000).

15. 15. Election, dir. Alexander Payne (Bona Fide Productions, MTV Films, and Paramount Pictures, 1999).

16. 16. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism: Including, A Commentary on “The Stranger” (Yale University Press, 2007), 20.

17. 17. See Frank Ruda, Indifference and Repetition; or, Modern Freedom and Its Discontents, trans. Heather H. Yeung (Fordham University Press, 2024), xi–xxiii.

18. 18. See Joan Copjec’s prescient analysis of Ronald Reagan in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Verso, [1994] 2015): “Americans didn’t love Reagan for what he said, but simply because he was Reagan” (143).