**3. The insufficiency of existing psychoanalytic approaches to identity politics**

Two notable psychoanalytic interrogations of identity politics, however, dispute the existence of its intersubjective dimension: Howard Schwartz's *Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order* (2016) and Žižek's *The Ticklish Subject* [2]. Schwartz and Žižek indict the intersectional, individualistic tendency for marginalized subjects to position their particular struggles at the forefront of politics, detracting from the rational, universal character of the political. Let us begin with Schwartz, who has published a litany of acerbic critiques against identity politics for the past two decades (beginning with his original intervention entitled "Psychodynamics of Political Correctness," 1997 [12]). Schwartz presents a Freudian critique of political correctness and identity politics along the following lines: these ideological systems dissociate the individual from the post-Oedipal symbolic order (paternal) in order to align the individual with pre-Oedipal primary narcissism (maternal). In the former psychoanalytic construct, individuals subjugate themselves to the social order for the sake of earning mother's love, affection, and care through an introjection and identification with father's societal position (e.g., the breadwinner); conversely, with respect to the latter

psychoanalytic construct, the individual refuses the Oedipal injunction and maintains his original relationship with mother, wherein the individual is ultimately accepted for no other reason than being himself: the unique, irreplaceable, special self (i.e., "a snowflake"). Primary narcissism, to put otherwise, substitutes the molly-coddled, unaltered, infallible self for the paternal ego ideal that separates child from mother; that is, for the paternal injunction, if the child wants to commune with mother, he will have to go through father (i.e., simultaneously foregrounding the castration complex and positioning the father as an intermediary—a becoming—for the child).

Schwartz [1], in short, disagrees with the anti-Oedipal (non-)logic of political correctness and identity politics: "What the paternal function accomplishes, the creation of social order based on mutual comprehensibility … the doctrine of microaggression, playing out the anti-Oedipal dynamics of political correctness, undoes" (55). In the process of eschewing the comprehensible structure of intersubjective reality, so the thinking goes, identity politics enables and justifies individualistic determinations of meaning based on marginalized subject positions: microaggressions, implicit biases, hidden prejudices, etc. The meaning of language is displaced from explicit linguistic content to implicit linguistic suggestions, such that an attribution of "articulateness" and "intelligence" to a person of color is interpreted as offensive rather than complimentary. Marginalized individuals determine the meaning of expressions, imputing and definitively establishing a particular interpretation of language based on background presuppositions. As a result, the individual becomes the fount of meaning, truth, and reality, recalling the pre-Oedipal position of primary narcissism: "The imaginary is presided over by the primitive mother, whose love validates us in our individuality" [1]. If the marginalized individual perceives, experiences, confronts, or encounters intersubjective reality in a specific manner, the individual's interpretation trumps any contrasting intersubjective interpretation (i.e., esse est. percipi). As Schwartz notes, "Political correctness is a bid for hegemony in the name of this primitive mother, expelling the father and undermining the paternal function. As such, it is a bid for the destruction of the symbolic" (ibid).

In particular, Schwartz rejects the arbitrary, individualized re-signification of "man" and "woman" for transgender identity. He refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of Caitlyn Jenner's status as a (trans-)woman: "Consider the case of Bruce Jenner, who now declares that he wants to be called Catelyn [sic] … He is a woman in a man's body, he says … What can it mean to say that a body is a woman's body if the person with that body can be a man? … It seems that the words 'man' and 'woman' have lost their meaning" (37-38). The tension within the intersectional, experiential disruption of established, intersubjective signification appears in the aforementioned case; that is, Caitlyn Jenner asserts her feeling of being-a-woman in contrast to her subjectification by the signifier "man," which diametrically opposes the identification with womanness in the Western binary of gender. Schwartz detests the intersectional modification of signifiers in the symbolic order because the undisturbed, prevailing organization of signification makes meaning, identification, and intelligibility possible in general. If children are not presented with clear-cut, defined gender roles for emulation, they will inevitably lack a sense of self and situatedness within the world: "Am I a boy or girl, the child wants to know, and the answer to this helps him to build a sense of himself in relation to the world, and an idea of what he is supposed to do in it" (38). Unfortunately for Schwartz, his idealistic conception of the post-Oedipal symbolic order closely resembles his psychoanalytic caricature of identity politics as a replication of pre-Oedipal primary narcissism.
