Why do we accept political forms of repression?

Lacan’s work on the mirror stage might hold a clue, where the promise of flight in the imaginary stage is contingent on the child having not yet mastered the symbolic register in which the Other functions in the context of language, authority, law, and its sanctioned transgressions.

If the child’s refusal to countenance his unfreedom should be relinquished upon maturation of his powers, then is it to posit that an originating condition of repression is lifted with the acquisition of language?

Then, repression can’t in every case be what is imposed from without. Sometimes it’s held in place nostalgically, or in place of lack of purpose.

In any case, you would wish it to be such that, by the time there is an apparatus available, its support no longer is necessary. That is why Lacan is careful to restrict the window of the vision of promise to a given developmental stage.

In that case, what we anticipate would not be the arrival at a future state in which the apparatus is available, but the attainment to a state that makes those supports unnecessary, redundant or obsolete, and this in exchange for a relinquishing of my dependent condition.

Compare structuring contradictions being concealed at right angles with the imaginary promise made to the unfree subject. Here the unfree subject can be seen as caught between an awareness of the promise as fantastical (subsequent to his ‘enlightenment’) and not knowing what to do with his freedom.

Compare a tentative space filled in advance of the passage of time (structuring contradictions) with coming into being by way of experience as a future state whose arrival is accompanied by the falling away of the imaginary wings, understood now as a kind of resistance or refusal by which I assert my otherness, to be discarded when no longer needed.

It’s possible the external support is considered necessary so that I may maintain my weakness, interpreted badly to mean my continued receptiveness to collective soul lines and an overall subordination of the individual as part to the whole collective. 

Then, the purpose and the function of the imaginary is restricted in its original intent as spiritual fortification and not constitutive of a promise or guarantee of material redemption.

To advance such a misunderstanding and apply it as identity markers to restrict movement on the square is not only outmoded and militaristic, it’s deployment (yet again) signals lack of equipage to deal with the present-day crisis, which is an unpreparedness with respect to change. It’s possible the Romanticist-modernist epiphanic moment, the narcissistic trance, is the reason you were caught off guard.

Understanding can only reflect, but in having attained perfect understanding this enables the mind’s departure from the place.

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