ABSTRACT
In The dread of sameness: social hatred and Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences”, Karl Figlio argues that antipathy is more rooted in sameness than in difference. Consciously, is the argument, we exclude others who are different from us, while unconsciously, it is sameness that we hate, and we avoid the experience of sameness by creating delusional differences. Thus our problem is not that of managing difference, but rather one of managing the unease which inheres in human society. The common sense of hating difference, states the author, is easier to believe than a hatred of sameness, as it reinforces a defence against self-examination. Such self-examination might reveal a hated similarity, pointing to a more fundamental hatred, of the similarity that is, in the limit, oneself. Figlio refers to Murer’s (2010) characterisation of the Dayton Accords as having consolidated the belief in the hatred of ethnic difference as the basis for narratives of identity. It replaced seventeen recognised national minorities with three identities inflamed by nationalist rhetoric: Serb, Croat, and Muslim, acting as ego ideals; identity-erosion thus becomes a rift between ego and ego ideal, a loss that sparks violence. While being left with oneself, it is argued, whether as an individual or as a group, is a hateful state of affairs, being left with an other very similar to oneself is nearly as
hateful, but the latter situation is one that offers a way out, namely the creation of an other by means of a projective attack. An example of the disjunction between conscious perception of difference and the unconscious phantasy of sameness that provokes hatred, is that of the difference between male and female. In reference to Freud’s notion of a taboo as a defence against a wish, Figlio adds that the horror of castration opposes a wish to be castrated. Alongside the son’s Oedipal wish to have mother to himself as a partner, there is the wish to be mother, and to be at the origination of himself. Castration horror, in this sense, acts as a defence, while the difference is in fact reassuring to the male, since it makes the threat appear to emanate from an external object, rather than as a wish from inside. The drive to be the same is a characteristic of narcissism; as the ego comes into being there is a tension between the ego being an object for itself and being replaced by an external object; here, external reality is a source of contamination. The ambivalence which in a mature form refers to loving and hating the same object, refers, at an earlier level, to the anxiety of annihilation in assimilating to, and differentiating from, an object. Figlio links this with a paranoidschizoid mode of thought, where the replica other threatens the ego with extinction, and the depressive mode, in which the ego gives itself over to protect the other. With reference to Mitchell’s (2003) work on the ambivalence constituted by the sameness between siblings, he emphasises how the presence of a sibling is both a comforting reassurance and at the same time “the thief of one’s being”. Girard (1988) goes further than Mitchell in claiming that violence inheres in sameness, managed by choosing and expelling or sacrificing a group member as its representative. This scapegoat is both internal and external to the society, both desecrated and sacralised, and the process is ritualised, so as to form the basis of religion. Crucially, the projection aims to dispel, not just the sameness, but the wish for sameness. Thus projection does not expel something already present in the self and unwanted, but rather creates the conviction of unwanted parts of the self in the very process of projection. Underlying the projection is the wish to have the qualities of, to be the same as, the other. In Yugoslavia, political disintegration produced nationalist sentiments as a secondary consequence, creating communities of fear (Allen, 1996). The Serbian attempt to cleanse the nation of Muslims and Catholics by rape, the author argues, exemplifies how the phantasy of contamination by the object is a projection that conceals the wish to contaminate the object. Terror and excitement
are confused and intermingle: the excitement of polluting and thereby destroying the object coexists with the excitement of dwelling in the object by inseminating it. The excited phantasy of polluting the woman is aimed at destroying her in hatred, and thus to re-establish a difference, while at the same time wanting to identify with her. Thus the attack enacts the collapse of identity into narcissism, sought as well as dreaded, revealing how a conscious aim, of defending against an aggressive object, is “normal” in the sense of well anchored in reality, while simultaneously supporting an illusory world of a regressive pull into a pre-objectal world.
