Podcast crusaders
I was listening to a podcast I rather enjoy, which focuses on ministers who have been murdered or committed suicide. In a recent episode, they discussed Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, and during the discussion, they touched on the infamous 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”). The Nazis classified expressionist art, among others, as degenerate. They collected numerous works, selling some, burning others, but also exhibiting a significant number of them. These exhibitions attracted millions of Germans. Often, they were staged alongside displays of what the Nazis deemed “proper” art — traditional, old-fashioned landscapes and portraits.
The podcast hosts couldn’t understand two things: first, why the Nazis would showcase art they considered degenerate; and second, why so many people flocked to see it. Their conclusion was that the Nazis simply hated this art and displayed it as a negative contrast to “proper” art, while the millions of Germans attending these exhibitions secretly enjoyed the forbidden works, as if behind the Nazis’ backs. But this only begs the question: why would they display what they hate? (and not simply hide or repress it?). The hosts took at self-explanatory, that the Nazis hate such art, but it is not at all clear, why want would want to exhibit what one hates (and why it would be much more popular than the “proper” art of their traditional “folk”-art).
The “Degenerate Art” exhibition was thrown together in less than three weeks. It opened in a cramped, improvised gallery space in Munich just one day after the nearby Great German Art Exhibition. Minors were not allowed inside because of the art’s supposedly harmful and corruptive nature. Here a precise description from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of the exhibitions:
“The exhibition’s organizers arranged more than 600 artworks in intentionally unflattering ways. They crowded sculptures and graphic works together. Paintings were suspended from the ceiling by long cords with little room between them. Many works were even left unframed and incorrectly labeled. Slogans painted on the walls mocked artworks as “crazy at any price” and “how sick minds viewed nature.” The walls also displayed quotes from Hitler and Goebbels. Their words provided the public with the official Nazi Party views on the purpose of art.
Organizers went to great lengths to discourage appreciation of the artworks. Despite this, public attendance exceeded all expectations. It is estimated that more than 2 million people passed through the cramped space in 1937. By contrast, the Great German Art Exhibition around the corner was heavily promoted and held in a spacious new building. Still, it attracted fewer than 500,000 visitors.” (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/degenerate-art-1).
The podcast hosts could not make sense of this. It seems obvious, that if consciously they preferred traditional kitsch art (in the style that Hitler himself tried to paint), it why even show the “degenerate” modernist paintings?
The point isn’t simply that the Nazis did not like degenerate art. If they simply thought it was wrong, they would not have put it on exhibitions over and over. They hated it, of course, but this art also served as a site of intense enjoyment (jouissance) for them — arguably even more so than the so-called proper art that they celebrated in their official aesthetic program. This we see in the ‘mocking labels’ (‘how sicked minds viewed nature’), and the jouissance they could get of just lumping them all together and so on. Even the fact that minors would not allowed it, far from addressed to these minors, were rather addressed to the adults actually entering: as though here was transgression to be had.
As Lacan notes in Seminar XVI, “the pervert is a defender of the faith.” This means that the pervert is not, as we usually think, someone who transgresses the law. On the contrary, he passionately defends it, often embarking on crusades precisely to make the Other, the Law, fully exist. Perversions explodes in modernity, precisely because the law, the master’s discourse, in postrevolutionary France is revealed as nothing but semblance, as imposture. The pervert instead tries to erect the law.
Crucially, it is in this defense, in the struggle against what threatens the law, that he derives his enjoyment. Lacan in seminar XVI coins enjoyment on Marx’s term of surplus-value: plus-de-jouir, surplus-enjoyment. It means dialectically both things at the same time: it is like surplus-value both “no more value” (not ‘counted’ in the transaction between capitalist and worker) and at the same time what the capitalist gets back in terms of profit. The same with enjoyment: the pervert that tries to “stop” obscene enjoyment in the name of the Law, himself gets “more enjoyment” out of precisely that. He can excuse his enjoyment behind his “duty” (like the “duty” to stop degenerate art).
The pervert never pursues enjoyment ‘directly’, in a an ‘egoistic’ manner: he makes himself the object of the Other’s jouissance: The enemy — the object of hatred — is indispensable because it is the fight against this enemy that brings enjoyment to begin with. This is also why, the more the Nazis exterminated the more the “jewish plot” loomed over their heads in their fantasy. That is why Nazi holocaust cannot be ‘explained’ through the Nazi predilection for ‘order’ or ‘efficiency’ as some explanations have it. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it: “The extermination of the Jews….is a phenomenon which follows essentially no logic (political, economical, social, military, etc.) other than a spiritual one.” “The Extermination is…the product of purely metaphysical decision.” (1990: 35; 48). In the terminology used here it is invested in the plus-de-jouir, in “more” enjoyment. It is done precisely as what defies ‘logic’ and ‘efficiency’ — the common-sensical image of the nazis as particularly ‘effective’ people is wholly misleading, rather this effectivness itself serves a mode of wasteful enjoyment (even to the point of undermining their own power). This is also why the readings of Nazism as “will-to-power” (Foucault, Agamben) is misleading. They precisely went beyond “power”, undermining their own ‘self-interest’ or ‘egotism’.
The pervert gets his fix by going on a crusade against the Other’s “obscene”, “degenerate” enjoyment. (enjoyment in contrast to pleasure always being “degenerate”, in the precise psychoanalytical sense of not “serving” any purpose).
In the case of degenerate art, it was not the traditional, “proper” art that stirred deep passions for the Nazis and the millions of Germans going to the exhibitions. Their true psychic and libidinal investment was in the hatred of what they deemed degenerate. This hatred was not just a reaction; it constituted the very core of their jouissance. Unlike fleeting pleasure, which is short-lived, jouissance — pleasure, that is not simply mixed with pain, but even coincides with it — can be sustained over time. This is why psychoanalysis’ discovery of enjoyment is crucial for understanding politics: it insists that enjoyment is not simply the opposite of pain; in fact, it often coincides with it, and we should always be aware of this when politicians are going on a crusade against this or that (“drain the swamp” and other slogans). Lacan says:
“I allowed myself to talk about crusaders [croisé], about believing in the Other [croire à l’Autre], and about the cross [croix]. French words link up like that — each language has its echoes and its coincidences (…). The crusades existed. They, too, were waged for the life of a dead God. (…) they encountered civilisation — in other words what they were seeking, a high degree of perversion — and at the same time reduced everything to rubble. Byzantium never rose from the ashes of the crusades. We must pay attention to such games, for they can be played again, even now, in the name of other crusades.” (230).
Lacan, of course, plays on the French homology between croisé (crossed, crusaders), croix (the cross), and croire (belief). The pervert is indeed “crossed,” not simply because he takes enjoyment in bearing his “cross,” the presumed “heavy burden,” but also because he fails to recognize the true source of his jouissance. But he is also a firm believer. It is similar to fundamentalist Christians who become passionately engaged in fighting against what they perceive as the countless contemporary manifestations of “obscene enjoyment” that seem to spring up everywhere around them.
The podcast hosts also struggled to understand how Goebbels, who had once appreciated expressionist art, could seemingly “forget” this when he fully aligned with Hitler’s aesthetic agenda. But here again, Lacan provides the key: Goebbels didn’t forget. His position could even easily co-exist with support for a so-called “nordic expressionism” His past appreciation of expressionist art didn’t vanish — it was, paradoxically, part of what fueled his enjoyment in denouncing and opposing it. This doesn’t mean that the Nazi was secretly an expressionist at heart. On the contrary, he genuinely detested the art he labeled as degenerate. But this very hatred became a powerful passion, providing a sense of purpose far more intense than any simple, untroubled pleasure. If pleasure is the nice relief we get when we obtain an object, enjoyment is the powerful passion we feel when we don’t have the object, but are struggling for it, what really “gets us going”, puts us besides ourselves.
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This is also why the pervert can never do without the obstacle that opposes him: the obstacle is the very source of his jouissance. Even as he defends the faith, it’s the act of defense — the battle itself — that matters more than the faith. If we take the slogan: “defender of faith”: The “faith” seems consciously like the most important, but really it is the defense that matters. “Faith” functions as a cover, allowing him to believe that his ultimate desire is to protect it from its enemies. Yet he can never fully acknowledge that what he truly desires is the jouissance derived from the struggle itself. As Lacan puts it, “the jouissance at issue is the Other’s.” (220).
The pervert, in other words, does not say, “This is my jouissance.” If that were the case, he — and the millions of Germans — would not have gone to the exhibition and said something like, “How disgusting! What obscene enjoyment must have taken place while making that picture!” — “they can’t even paint in proper proportions! what a sick brain — now let me go back and see it again!”. Meanwhile, the exhibition featuring “proper art” (traditional Biedermeier-style paintings of rural landscapes, farms, cows in the fields, and mills) were visited briefly and quickly forgotten, although they constituted the official ideal.
This provides the key to understanding the pervert: although he may officially pursue his own pleasure — or even take pride in claiming not to care about it, that he is a just a tool serving the greater Cause — the crusade is never for his own sake but for God’s. The jouissance is always posited as belonging to the Other: “I do it to procure enjoyment for God.” At the same time, the pervert is fascinated by the enjoyment of the Other: “Look at the degenerate art!” In both cases, the pervert’s passion revolves not around his own enjoyment but around the enjoyment he attributes to the Other. The enjoyment is already mobilized in the struggle against the enemy, degenerate art, it does not come after the struggle has ended.
You might ask: but why are does Lacan say that the crusades are carried out in the name of a dead God? This point is crucial. Although predating modernity it is precisely a kind of passion that is involved, when the father is dead. It is as though the passion is there to resurrect the father. The logic is: “if I die on my crusade, for God — this must mean that God really exist”. The sacrifice brings God into being as the One for whom one sacrificed oneself. (This is also why the Nazis constantly refer to terms like ‘destiny’ etc). According to Lacan of course, the father is not dead in modernity. He was already dead. Only he did not know it. This is why the crusades and also the perversion in nazi-Germany are precisely a “passion” in response to this dead God. As Mladen Dolar writes:
“To be sure, Freud proposed the myth of the murder of the father, of the dead father acquiring more power than the living one, ruling as the Name of the Father, as the symbolic authority underpinning the authority of the symbolic, etc. But one could say (…) that with the advent of modernity it was the dead father himself who died. He lost his symbolic impact, his name stopped being the foundation of authority, it was revealed as an imposture. “(2023: 9).
In other words, perversion is precisely a response to the Name-of-the-Father losing its authority. This is why the pervert is actually a père-version, a leaning towards the father, an attempt to restore his authority. Perverts do not transgress the law. They try to transgress, but through the law itself (as when the Nazi used the Führer as a “law” that could legitimize their transgressions).
In terms of Trump and Netanyahu we only have to pay attention to the way they speak, the depersonalization of the corporate and instrumentalising speech: they do rarely talk of Palestineans, instead they talk of an “area” or “individuals”. Thereby they seperate the space from the people living there, as though it is not really Palestinean homeland, but just a kind of virgin territory, that one must “save” from all the rubble, as though the people living there now, Palestineans, are somehow in the “way” of peaceful “progress” (i.e. profit).
As Lacan says, the crusades are far from over. New ones are starting every day. We could even supply Trump with what he doesn’t recognize himself: no, tariff is not the most beautiful word in his dictionary — crusade is. But then again, he uses the tariff precisely as a crusade, that is, as a means to procure jouissance, and in a distinctly perverse way — through the infamous “bullying.” He frames tariffs not just as economic tools but as a defense against the obscene jouissance of others — Canada and Mexico, for example. The point is not merely whether these countries are materially exploiting the U.S. by “stealing” wealth; what truly fuels his crusade is the fantasy that they have stolen enjoyment — that they are enjoying obscenely at the expense of hard-working Americans.
Secondly, Trump’s followers derive their own jouissance from his rhetoric, particularly in how he bulldozes over the usual unwritten rules of diplomacy and political correctness. Jouissance can never be obtained directly; it always circulates through some mediating object or discourse — like the discussion around tariffs. The tariff itself is just the surface; beneath it lies the real investment in the fantasy of stolen enjoyment and the pleasure of transgressing normative boundaries. We can also see the pertinence of Lacan’s remark, in that crusaders find what they are looking for — civilization — but leave a rubble. Just yesterday Trump, suggested to take over Gaza and make it into a Riviera, instead of the rubble and ashes make it a capitalist haven. We can be sure that this would in fact, not find rubble, but a civilization (Palestinians) and instead leave only rubble. We often hear that Trump’s proposals are not simply economic, it is more about power- what this misses is perhaps that even the pervert does not know what he is really doing (in other words, “power” is not everything), the pervert is also “crossed” (has an unconscious).
There are also differences, of course. The Nazis would never directly engage in the kind of obscenity that Trump and Musks are doing, like Musk proposing “DOGE” as the name for his new efficiency-measures, and making nazi-salutes as a kind of joke, but also not. It is like Musk doesn’t himself know if its a joke, he just kind of tests the waters to see. The same with Trump, because he is so obscene with his own person (saying vulgarities all the time), it is as if he can politically also do whatever he wants, breaking all unwritten rules — like closing down United States’ aid to developing countries in a few hours and just call it “tremendous fraud”, whereas Musk follows by calling it a “Vipers nest”.
However, we should be careful not to criticize the pervert (today’s right-wing populism) merely from the liberal position of inclusivity. The liberal position operates within the same dialectic. A striking example is the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel series My Struggle — a provocative title that directly echoes Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The question is: why would a writer from a Scandinavian welfare state choose such a title?
The point is that in the liberal universe, nothing can go beyond pleasure; it lacks the kind of jouissance that sustains right-wing passion. Thus, it needs some form of the jouissance of the Other — here, the allusion to Mein Kampf — as a structural position. Knausgaard’s novels have nothing to do with Nazis or fascism, so it is clear what fascinated him: the envy of right-wing passion, which, however problematic, appears at least more “authentic” than the mundane reality of Scandinavian welfare-state life. Much of My Struggle revolves around everyday concerns — picking up children from kindergarten, going for a jog, having a small affair. There is nothing that truly stirs the passions. And so, as a return of the repressed, we find the title of Hitler’s book reappearing in Knausgaard’s work — not as an endorsement, but as a way to enjoy through the Other, to inject a borrowed intensity into an otherwise uneventful world.
Lacan does offer us a way out of this endless, perverse dialectic, and it comes from what he later calls the ethics of the well-spoken. It is the enjoyment not of going on a crusade, but in the enjoyment of words themselves — like wordplay (croisé, croix, croisade — which works better in French). This is not about some law or faith that must ultimately be defended, leaving everything else in rubble. Rather, it is an enjoyment that does not draw a clear distinction between the subject and the Other, much like the way words, poetically, “come” to Lacan — not from any specific source but through fortuitous homophonies in the French language. It is like a chance encounter, something that does not require defending because one does not even know what territory there would be to defend. Lacan does say that the psychoanalyst is like a saint, so we have to oppose the saint to the knight of perversion, but then the saints is not the upholder of any faith, but rather the psychoanalytical word that pierce through all banners of faith and crusades.
We can also suggest an exit out of the perverse dialectic in the study of the “entartete” (“degenerate”) art itself. The problem with this art for the nazis were of course its lack of “proper” form. It did not conform to traditional genres of painting, but was a radically break with such traditional limitations. Instead, however, it set up its own limitations, its own formal limits. So this is perhaps also different kind of political organisation, although it does not conform to a specific programe. It would be a sublimation of new sets of objects. This could also be a called a politics of universality, in so far as the universal is what cuts through any particular symbolic identity, it makes the new possible. To take an example of “degenerate art” (although he himself turned a nazi eventually), Emil Nolde’s Das Leben Christi. It is clearly not “picturesque”, but uses the religious painting in new way, enabling his own particular brush-strokes. It is like the religion here only serves as a cover for the plus-de-jouir of the brush-strokes themselves. Perhaps this was too radical for Nolde himself, so that he later turned a nazi, trying to be a representative of “nordic expressionism”. Nevertheless, the painting does reveal, like Lacan’s word-play a kind of law, that is not authorized (unlike the pervert), the law that follows from sublimation. We need that more than every today, to break the vicious circle between perversion and neurosis, as they feed of each other.
Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the other. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023.
Lind, Kristian, and Simon-Emil Ammitzbøl Bille. “Joseph Goebbels — Propagandaministeren.” Ministermord, episode 5. DR, 2025. https://www.dr.dk/lyd/p1/ministermord/ministermord-5
