This paper traces the genealogy of contemporary illiberalism, arguing that it stems from a historical sedimentation that systematically narrows the space for the cause of liberation. Grounding this trajectory in a Marxist–Lacanian framework, I demonstrate how elite-illiberalism operates through a dual structural mechanism of negation: ontic disavowal ( Verleugnung ) and epistemic foreclosure ( Verwerfung ). Drawing on Domenico Losurdo’s counter-history of liberalism, the affective turn literature, and Chris Knight’s bifurcation thesis, I map how procedural (il)liberalism serves the power elite. These strands converge in a critical re-examination of Noam Chomsky, showing how his computational formulation of Universal Grammar executes an epistemic foreclosure that ejects the historical materiality of lalangue from language, while his institutional self-positioning at MIT relies on an ontic disavowal that converts his theoretical radicalism into an instrumental legitimation of the ruling class. By demonstrating how therapeutic left-illiberalism and right-illiberalism function as complementary modalities of a single elite-illiberal system, I propose a program of radical liberalism premised on the truth of the split subject ( Spaltung ), capable of sustaining difference without demanding consensus.
Contemporary psychology treats the construction, maintenance, and enhancement of a coherent self-concept as the implicit telos of therapeutic intervention, an assumption so thoroughly embedded in clinical training, diagnostic frameworks, and outcome measurement that it functions less as a theoretical commitment than as a perceptual habit. This article argues that compulsive identity maintenance operates, across diverse clinical presentations and neurobiological substrates, as an addictive process: self-addiction , characterized by salience, tolerance, withdrawal, and persistence despite harm, with substantial selfhood itself as the object of dependence. Drawing on post-Kantian critical philosophy, predictive processing neuroscience, psychedelic ego-dissolution research, and Deleuzian critiques of therapeutic capture, the article traces how independent intellectual and empirical traditions converge on a common finding: that rigid self-referential processing tracks suffering while its systematic loosening tracks improvement. The self-addiction framework is applied to five standing debates the identity paradigm has rendered intractable: the Dodo Bird verdict, process-based therapy’s unexamined stopping point, Jungian outcome data, the narcissism epidemic paradox, and the ethics of ego-syntonic pathology. In each case, it both explains the debate and reveals the identity paradigm as the constraint that kept the explanation invisible. It proposes metacognitive agency, the bidirectional capacity to modulate both flexibility and rigidity in context, as an alternative therapeutic telos, while addressing the structural preconditions of flexible selfhood for marginalized communities and the recursive risk that dissolution becomes its own object of attachment.
In response to the article “The Retreat to Positionality Statements: A Critique of the Assumptions (and How to Avoid Making Them),” I argue that the authors’ critique is borne out of their own assumptions about the nature and function of positionality statements, the meaning of science, and the (alleged) tarnishing of objectivity owing to researchers’ personal, political, and ideological commitments. Moreover, for all that the authors present themselves as the torchbearers of scientific inquiry, there are no examples of positionality statements, no explicit evidence of their putatively deleterious effects, and no compelling argument for why they ought to be abandoned. This suggests that other motives may inform their critique. What these motives are, however, remains unclear.
Dall’Aglio’s article asks a seductive question: What if Lacanian drive theory could finally be translated into the language of neuroscience, predictive processing, and the Free Energy Principle? This commentary argues that the proposed synthesis works less through conceptual rigor than through a series of increasingly unstable analogies. Terms such as “constancy,” “fields,” “repression,” and “trajectory” slide between psychoanalysis, biology, and mathematics as if similarity of form guaranteed theoretical equivalence. The result is a strange conceptual universe in which Lacanian drive appears simultaneously as structural impossibility, affective intensity, computational optimization, and solenoidal flow. Focusing on the article’s treatment of constant pressure, predictive processing, nondeclarative memory, and dual-aspect monism, I argue that the article repeatedly mistakes metaphorical resonance for commensurability between explanatory domains. The problem is not simply reductionism. More fundamentally, the article stages a contemporary fantasy: that the constitutive gap between psychoanalysis and neuroscience can finally be overcome through theoretical synthesis. What emerges, however, is not a bridge between discourses, but a symptomatic attempt to make psychoanalysis legible within the dominant scientific imaginary of prediction, regulation, and self-organization.
