The liberal-democratic death drive: A political economy of affective compulsion

This article provides a psychoanalytic–materialist critique of liberal democracy. It argues that the failures of liberalism are structurally necessary, founded in property, ideology and affect. Liberalism survives through the ritualisation of deferral, where disappointment generates loyalty as dissatisfaction is domesticated through civic repetition. Deploying Freud's death drive, psychoanalysis is presented as a diagnostic tool for tracing how institutions structure desire through failed performance. This libidinal economy, consolidated by ideological apparatuses of reproduction and possessive individualism, secures subjects in stable attachments through its management of disappointment. Participation is rearticulated as attachment to process rather than outcome; melancholia operates as modality of governance. Against reformist and agonistic theories, the article contends that liberalism is beyond reform and that the challenge to respond to its crisis must work outside its grammar. It calls for an unbinding of political desire from the apparatuses that displace and defuse failure into fidelity.