Cartesian Political Discourse

Political discourse fails to explain the rise and nature of authoritarian governments in industrialized societies when it presupposes the rational political actor. Time and time again, the rational, self-interested political agent fails to measure up with particular political situations and circumstances, often leading to unpredictable catastrophes. This rational political actor has its origins in the Cartesian, ahistorical, self-conscious subject—a subject capable of using the "light of reason" to guide its epistemological and even political judgments. Even much of modern political discourse borrows from this Cartesian legacy by presupposing an ahistorical and even mechanistic "science of politics" A pertinent counter to this naively optimistic
Finally, the western subject is a rational agent that can make decisions in her best interest and is capable of accessing the objective or at least most impartial worldview. "Other minds" can only be postulated on the basis of a self-identical, epistemologically certain self-consciousness. While this subject is capable of relating to other subjects, it is only capable to doing so on the basis of a rational agreement or social contract. The political purchase is that subjects are in control of the external world and largely know what they are doing. The traditional western conception of subjectivity presupposes rationality, independence and frigidity.
This independent, static and rational conception of subjectivity is also inherently problematic. The predominant problem is the necessary distinction between the subject and the object. Under the traditional conception, the subject and object are independent and relate through an untenable dualism. This difficulty is known as the "hard problem of consciousness", which asks how the physical can exactly translate into the mental and vice-versa. The dualism between mind and body is problematic because it fails to explain exactly how the mental can relate to the physical if they are distinct
Rather than a simply empty I, positing an unconscious allows one to acknowledge particular subjective experiences as suggesting a hidden meaning that simply would not be available in a self-present consciousness. This unconsciousness allows us to explain errors such as slips-of-the-tongues and other errors that even a biologically reductive account would not be able to account for. The psychoanalytic notion of an unconscious provides greater explanatory power than the conventional account of