Where the negative finds no place

the failure to inscribe lack

Abstract

This article proposes to understand contemporary radicalization as a psycho-political symptom of a structural refusal of negativity. By articulating Lacanian psychoanalysis, André Green’s notion of the failure of the negative, and Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of non-identity, it argues that radicalization cannot be reduced to a merely ideological or behavioral phenomenon. Rather, it should be understood as the expression of a subjective and social economy that eliminates lack, ambivalence, and contradiction as conditions of desire, symbolization, and critical thought. The article contends that the suppression of the negative produces forms of identitarian closure, symbolic violence, and the refusal of alterity, thereby endangering both democratic experience and the very possibility of psychic elaboration. Finally, it argues that psychoanalysis, by sustaining negativity, offers a fundamental ethical and political contribution in the face of contemporary dynamics of radicalization.