This chapter, authored with Joshua Gunn of University of Texas at Austin, theorizes “the mirror of enjoyment,” a dynamic of projective disidentification in which the (liberal) other’s pleasure comes at the expense of the (conservative) ego. Set in the context of the early COVID-19 pandemic, the chapter offers multiple examples of how pain offers a mode of political affirmation that confirms the subject’s identity through self-righteous rituals of suffering.
It opens by explaining the mirror of enjoyment, while each subsequent section explains this concept at work in relation to a unique anecdote drawn from the COVID-19 era. The first is about sadistic pleasure and discusses police officers’ resistance to vaccine mandates nationwide. Here, enjoyment takes the familiar form of ressentiment, a revenge taken out upon both self and other. The second is the zero-sum-game, which places Giorgio Agamben alongside the deep state conspiracy mongering of Alex Jones and Joe Rogan. Here, enjoyment manifests as state phobia, a paranoid rejection of governing institutions. The final section, titled ill-liberalism and the drive, stages an imaginary dialogue between Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics and Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, both of which bespeak a faith in rational governing norms while perpetuating the continued politicization of governing institutions and infectious disease response alike.
The chapter is published in Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2024), edited by John Louis Lucaites and Christopher Gilbert. You can find a copy of the chapter below:
Atilla Hallsby 