Abstract
Since its inception, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society has sought to locate itself on a critical edge wherein the tools of psychoanalysis, critical theory, and social critique might be brought to bear on societal institutions to interrogate extant practices and to explore ways of imagining a more just and equitable world. Our journal provides spaces for vigorous debate and welcomes subaltern and critical perspectives and a plurality of psychoanalytic and critical ways of thinking. In recent years a marked shift to the right has been evident in global politics. This is evidenced by the election of populist leaders who espouse hard rhetoric on migration, as well as an assault on racial difference and gender variance, accompanied by an escalating populist rhetoric, strategically deployed on the internet to push back against reason, argument, science, or critically or ethically grounded thought. The white nationalist mantra “You will not replace us,” publicly chanted at a march at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in August 2017, bespeaks an anxiety about a decline in white dominance and a fear of a pluralism that, in zero-sum thinking, signifies loss and annihilation in the face of a call for a more plural and egalitarian world.