Disorienting Austerity: The Indebted Citizen as the New Soul of Europe

This chapter examines the relation between citizenship and orientalism under the new conditions of indebtedness resulting from austerity. By broadly drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the chapter argues that austerity has enacted a new economy of anxiety predicated upon the ‘intensification’ of certain affects (sacrifice, pain, restraint) and disavowal of others (indulgence, gratification, pleasure), contributing to reconfigure European political subjectivities. Taking its departure from this new economy, the crisis of Europe is described as the anxiety produced by a reversal of those paradigms that have sustained the image of Europe so far. This reversal coincides with a return in Europe of that which for a long time was ejected outside in order for Europe itself to be constituted as a unified symbolic reality. The chapter illustrates how this new economy has exposed a certain ‘disorienting’ effect of austerity, contributing to rekindling the ambiguities of Europe and therefore reconfiguring the image of the European self against its others. It concludes that this reconfiguration forms the background against which a new relationship between citizenship and orientalism in contemporary Europe should be examined.