Disorienting Austerity: The Indebted Citizen as the New Soul of Europe

Abstract

This chapter examines the relation between citizenship and orientalism under the new conditions of indebtedness resulting from austerity. By broadly drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the chapter argues that austerity has enacted a new economy of anxiety predicated upon the 'intensification' of certain affects (sacrifice, pain, restraint) and disavowal of others (indulgence, gratification, pleasure), contributing to reconfigure European political subjectivities. Taking its departure from this new economy, the crisis of Europe is described as the anxiety produced by a reversal of those paradigms that have sustained the image of Europe so far. This reversal coincides with a return in Europe of that which for a long time was ejected outside in order for Europe itself to be constituted as a unified symbolic reality. The chapter illustrates how this new economy has exposed a certain 'disorienting' effect of austerity, contributing to rekindling the ambiguities of Europe and therefore reconfiguring the image of the European self against its others. It concludes that this reconfiguration forms the background against which a new relationship between citizenship and orientalism in contemporary Europe should be examined.

Religion and Islamic Radicalization

“…While families, local milieus, and cultural and social environments are less and less able to offer solid roots, the precarities of working life produced by a neoliberal economic order have contributed to dismantling the old symbolic and imaginary parameters of wealth and social and political integration. In the case of Europe, these precarities have also contributed to the displacing crisis of its self-representation, while, in the wider sense, they have aggravated the type of social erosion that the capitalist discourse promotes (Mura, 2015). We can conclude here that they have deprived young generations -now transformed into the social precariat we have come to know -both of time and of their ability to project into the future: to be the master of their present and future destiny.…”

In focus: The other side of Islamophobia: A review of the conference on Islam and psychoanalysis – University of Manchester, June 26–28, 2017

“…While his paper developed his thesis on Euro Islam and its relation with Islam, in my reading I find his some of his ideas emanating from his latest work, Disorienting Austerity: The Indebted citizen as the New Soul of Europe (). For those interested in themes of religion, citizenship, Islam and Lacan his work, The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism: A Study in Islamic Political Thought () is an engaging read.…”