Culpability and the Politics of Love

In L’amour du censeur, a seminal work published in French in 1974 but as yet untranslated into English, Pierre Legendre uses the Freudian Oedipus complex as a reading grid with which to decipher the libidinal dynamics underpinning Christian civilisations. This paper exposes Legendre’s work, and complements it by elucidating the play of the different modalities of identification conceptualised by Freud in Group Psychology. Horizontal and vertical identifications channel the investments that lend consistency to a political figure, an ideology, a discourse. Legendre’s work reminds us that the primary function of a given civilisation is to institute a workable libidinal economy for its subjects, and that politics names the knot of the social bond.