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Genius or Suicide
Judith Butler
Donald Trump would have us believe that his behaviour, his lawbreaking, is just fine, perfect
even, and that the impeachment hearings are a kind of coup. What he has done he would do
again. Indeed, he has already done it again with his open appeal to China to investigate the
Bidens and his refusal to comply with the impeachment inquiry. Pundits such as Roger Cohen
of the New York Times and Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s short-lived director of
communications (whose main achievement in life may be his name), say that all this is a form
of madness, speculating that Trump is either carrying out a very public suicide or exhibiting
some weird genius for survival. But is it really either/or?

We have wandered into a psychoanalytic wonderland. Elected politicians are supposed to shy
away from the prospect of being shamed or found guilty of breaking the law. Yet Trump owns
the things he does, not by demonstrating repentance but through a flamboyant display of
shamelessness. Some commentators suggest that Trump is trying to anaesthetise the public
to his wrongdoing or to normalise his actions, but that account cannot address the ‘genius or
suicide’ dilemma. One reason psychoanalysis as a form of critique has never been more
important than it is today is that we are being asked to contemplate actions that could be
either suicidal or a means of triumphant survival. But what if they are both, and playing out
now in the political arena? How are suicide and survival linked in the psychic field we call
‘Trump’? It isn’t just that he thinks shameless confession normalises his crimes and makes
possible his triumph in a world in which law and crime have become fatally confused. It’s that
he seems to regard upholding the law and his oath of office as a form of weakness, convinced
as he is that only those who circumvent the law (by evading tax disclosure requirements, by
ignoring constitutional constraints on executive power) are smart and powerful enough to
prevail. He banks as well on the enthusiastic admiration his base has for those who have the
guts to flout the law: such romantic criminals are icons to those who thrill to the fantasy of
living above and outside the law, without inhibition or shame.

When commentators speak of Trump’s ‘death wish’, they are on to something, though maybe
not quite what they imagine. The death drive, in Freud, is manifested in actions characterised
by compulsive repetition and destructiveness, and though it may be attached to pleasure and
excitement, it is not governed by the logic of wish fulfilment. Repetitive action unguided by a
wish for pleasure takes distinctive forms: the deterioration of the human organism in its
effort to return to a time before individuated life; the nightmarish repetition of traumatic
material without resolution; the externalisation of destructiveness through potentially
murderous behaviour. Both suicide and murder are extreme consequences of a death drive
left unchecked. The death drive works in fugitive ways, and is fundamentally opportunistic: it
can be identified only through the phenomena on which it seizes and surfs. It may operate in
the midst of moments of radical desire, pleasure, an intense sense of life. But it also operates
in moments of triumphalism, the bold demonstration of power or strength, or in states of
extreme conviction. Only later, if ever, comes the jolt of realisation that what was supposed to
be empowering and exciting was in fact serving a more destructive purpose.

There is no need to speculate about Trump’s childhood, or to subscribe to a biological notion

of the death drive, to recognise in his public display a compulsion to do himself in, or to do in
the world that will not let him have his way. Shamelessness is the vector through which the
death drive works. If he is not shamed by the accusations against him, they do not ‘work’ and
the accusations become fainter and weaker, less and less audible in the public sphere. At the
same time, on display for the world to see is that Trump’s repeated and compulsive defiance
of shame and rejection shows just how imperilling those spectres are for him. Yes, he comes
off as someone whose main aim is to show that he is proud and triumphant and innocent in
the face of every accusation of incapacity, criminality and unethical conduct; the law will have
no power over him. But that coin can flip. For Trump’s power as a lawbreaker relies on the
persistence of law, and if he succeeds in destroying all sense of law by erasing the distinction
between criminal and legal actions, his power also vanishes. In other words, he needs law in
order to become the monomaniacal lawbreaker he seeks to be. And to the extent that he
needs the law, he reproduces it as the very condition of his reckless, lawless triumphalism.
Yet even this dialectical twist is not the end of the story.

Invoking the law and the criminality of his enemies is one of Trump’s favourite tactics: he
knows its power. ‘Lock her up!’ he still encourages his supporters to chant about Hillary
Clinton, and now he can be heard suggesting that Joe Biden deserves the electric chair. The
detention centres on the southern border of the US, too, represent a criminal and life-
destroying instantiation of legal power. Notoriously, he claimed he could shoot someone in
the middle of Fifth Avenue and still win the election. Immunity from the law has become the
very definition of power, and so the loss of immunity would be his demise. His belief that only
those who can escape the law survive is demonstrated by his appeal to China to investigate
the Bidens – a rhetorical repetition of the crime of which he is accused in relation to Ukraine.
And yet, although Trump’s ostensible power is displayed by a willingness to act despite and
against the law, the law is now belatedly rearing its head, asking him to turn over tapes and
documents, seeking to hold him accountable. In refusing to acknowledge the power that the
law holds over him, he is setting himself up as a target of the chant he started: ‘Lock him up!’

Of course, Trump’s survival has depended on a swarm of lawyers constantly doing his bidding
in court, but that is one of the milder paradoxes of his traffic with the law. Perhaps the most
important has become more clearly visible in recent days. As the House of Representatives
considers impeachment, Trump is actively piling up evidence for them in the media even as
he refuses to turn anything over to them officially in fulfilment of his legal obligations. He is
standing on Fifth Avenue – but is the gun pointed at an enemy, or at himself? Or both? If he
 does finally get taken down, escorted by federal guards from the White House or, after he has
left office, extracted from Mar-a-Lago or from one Trump property or another, he will
doubtless be spewing accusations and insults as he goes. He will try to destroy in the course of
being destroyed. But for him it will be the scene of a lifetime, a raging battle to determine who
delivers the final judgment against whom.

Was the Trump regime always meant to end this way? Maybe. His base is taken by the drama
of the reckless sovereign, the ultimate representative of state power living shamelessly
outside the law. It is a manic escapade, a mythological thriller in which the ruler who declares
his ‘great and unmatched wisdom’ threatens the destruction of the Turkish economy days
before he unleashes the Turks on the Kurds. The rhetoric would be laughable if the
consequences were not so murderous.

At best, a lethal joke is being played out here, as the sovereign pumps up his destructive
powers on the eve of his exposure and legal capture. By continuing to unleash rhetorical
utterances that confirm all that the investigators need in order to impeach him, while refusing
to yield to the impeachment proceedings, he manically proves that he is above and outside
the law even as he seals the legal judgment against him. The shameful ‘end’ is what he fends
off and solicits at the same time: getting shamed is not what he wants, yet he moves
compulsively in that direction. Here mania takes the form of an unrelenting fight, an
obsessional pursuit of his enemies, a limitless self-aggrandisement, his weaponised messages
fired out into the world as a barrage of daily tweets, keeping going at all costs – because what
would happen if he stopped? How odd that Trump may well give us back the law as he is
forced to submit to the law and go down: will he then become, even if only in his demise, the
lawgiver? The price he would pay might well be prison, an infinity of shame waiting for him at
the end of the road.

I have offered no more than a dream sequence of my own. It may be that shame and guilt has
suffused all he has ever felt. The jury is out. My wager/dream is that he would rather die than
pause to feel the shame that passes through him and is externalised as destruction and rage.
If he ever registers shame, it may be only in that briefest moment just as it turns outwards, to
be expelled into the world around him. It can never properly be lived as his own, because his
psychic structure is built to block it – a gigantic task. If in the end shame ever turns back on
him, it would – according to the rules of his psychic playbook – be a suicidal submission.
Expect then a very long and loud howl, as he launches a climactic accusation against the
whole world. Let us hope that by then he has been deprived of his access to military power.

Vol. 41 No. 20 · 24 October 2019 » Judith Butler » Genius or Suicide

page 10 | 1681 words

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Limited 2019 ^ Top