The Chomskyan Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Illiberalism

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.