Between Desire and Fantasy: A Lacanian Approach to Jair Bolsonaro's Electoral Victory in Brazil

Bolsonaro's election in Brazil is a political phenomenon that still needs to be explained. His victory, based on the defense of religion, nation, family, order, and morality, can be understood as an unprecedented shift by Brazilian voters toward the far right. This article aims to theoretically discuss some of the roots of this phenomenon based on: 1) Lacanian psychoanalytic theory; 2) academic literature on changes and transformations in the sociocultural order in the second half of the 20th century; and 3) academic literature on Bolsonaro's victory. Preliminary research leads us to believe that, in addition to Bolsonaro's election being motivated by an individual phenomenon with the vote of the left-behinds, discouraged by globalization, it was also motivated by a collective movement, triggered by a cultural backlash — the result of rapid transformations in the system of beliefs, values, and traditional institutions. Thus, the choice to vote for Bolsonaro was motivated more by fear and popular insecurity in the face of these transformations than by actual political or ideological convictions. In this scenario, Lacanian concepts such as desire, castration, decline of the father's name, fantasy, jouissance, and the big other help us to understand, link, and relate these two spheres. In this sense, from individual perspective, Bolsonaro's success can be understood by the vote as jouissance and the fulfillment of a fantasy that was nourished by the castration of individual desire through the revival of moral values and traditional institutions, frustrated by the progressive governments that preceded him (more specifically, the administrations of Workers' Party between 2002 and 2014). From collective perspective, Lacanian interpretation allows us to understand the sociocultural crisis from the category of the decline of the father's name — understood in the Lacanian perspective as the crisis of paternal symbolic function of law and order, resulting from the decline of traditional values and institutions — and to infer that the crisis was fertile ground for the election of Bolsonaro as president. Furthermore, Lacanian theory allows us to understand the choice of his leadership as a form of popular vote for a big other, in this case embodied by an authoritarian, violent, and inflexible figure, who followed a course of action that was alien to the rules of the democratic system, establishing new laws and impositions, among which the coup of January 8 is the best representation. The triangulation between Lacanian theory, sociocultural crisis, and Bolsonaro's election will show us whether Lacanian concepts can contribute to the understanding of the sociocultural crisis and the election of Jair Bolsonaro as separate phenomena and, furthermore, will shed light on the possibility of linkage, connection, and overdetermination between the two phenomena. Our ultimate goal is to verify the possibility of incorporating Lacanian theory into the field of political science (already done by authors such as Laclau and Žižek), to offer an answer to the incomprehension of Bolsonaro's victory and, marginally, to what extent the sociocultural crisis can or cannot be understood as a trigger for the rise of radical right extremist leaders.