One can clearly discern that in Goa, a distinct form of political subjectivity is emerging at the intersection of national aspiration and regional memory. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) sustained influence in the state, often through coalitions and pragmatic absorptions, operates not merely through policy or electoral machinery but through a deeper psychopolitical command: the superegoic injunction to enjoy the nation and its dominant religious-cultural frame. This command, drawn from Lacanian insights, manifests as a haunting presence of what Derrida termed hauntology, where specters of the past and promised futures disrupt the present, shaping political behavior while producing new forms of exclusion.
Lacanian superego does not merely prohibit; it commands enjoyment. “Jouis!”Enjoy! becomes the obscene underside of official law and development rhetoric. In the Goan context, this translates into an imperative to derive surplus jouissance from identification with a unified Hindu-majority Indian nation. Citizens are called upon to celebrate temple restorations, cultural assertions, hate rants or just bliss in a sense that our time has come. The enjoyment is never complete; it thrives on repetition and lack. One must perpetually reaffirm pride in civilizational revival, defend against perceived demographic threats, and consume the imagery of a rising India. Failures like unemployment among youth, environmental degradation from mining and real estate, or the dilution of Goan identity do not dismantle the structure. Instead, they fuel the drive: more vigilance, more assertion, more enjoyment extracted from the very struggle against “ enemies ” or villians who are deemed responsible for the the historical grievances.
This command is inherently hauntological. Goa’s present is populated by ghosts. The Portuguese colonial legacy lives in the Specters that are called into being by the sooth sayers that includes our highest political leaders like the CM of Goa. These specters haunt the nationalist enjoyment. The superegoic voice says: enjoy the reclamation of sacred spaces, yet the history whispers of plural pasts that cannot be fully assimilated. Regional identity, “Goemkarponn,” becomes another ghost neither fully alive in its autonomous form nor entirely dead under national integration. Political discourse oscillates between development promises and cultural anxiety, producing a melancholic enjoyment. The nation is always almost fully enjoyed, yet its full realization is deferred, keeping subjects libidinally invested.
In Goa’s politics, this hauntological enjoyment structures alliances and defections. Fluid party loyalties, common in the small state, reflect a cynical jouissance in the game itself which has power as an end in its own right. BJP’s governance blends economic liberalization (tourism, pharma, mining) with symbolic Hindutva gestures. The command to enjoy the nation-religion fusion offers a fantasy of wholeness against the fragmentation of globalization and migration. Yet this fantasy requires its constitutive outside. The enjoyment of the majority “we” depends on the figure who cannot fully enjoy or belong. This is the otherized ,demonized constructed enemy .
Here the psychopolitics turns biopolitical. Michel Foucault’s biopower, power exercised over life itself, managing populations through norms, health, territory, and productivity merges with the Lacanian drive. The imperative to enjoy the nation becomes a mechanism for sorting lives. Those who align with the dominant narrative participate in the collective surplus enjoyment. Those who question it minorities (especially certain Christian communities wary of cultural homogenization), environmental activists opposing reckless development, independent intellectuals, and critical journalists risk reduction to homo sacer , Giorgio Agamben’s figure of bare life. They exist within the territory but outside full political protection. Their voices can be muted, their livelihoods disrupted, their dissent framed as anti-national or disruptive to “development enjoyment,” without the act counting as proper sacrilege. They become killable (metaphorically or literally through social death) yet not mournable within the dominant symbolic order.
In Goa, this manifests in subtle and overt ways. Land issues and tourism-driven displacement create zones where certain lives matter less. Activists challenging mining or implementatiom of coastal regulation find themselves cast as obstacles to progress and national integration. Intellectuals and journalists highlighting demographic anxieties or cultural erosion risk being labeled as remnants of colonial mentality ,the very ghosts the superegoic command seeks to exorcise. The biopolitical dimension is clear: power does not simply repress; it incites enjoyment in the approved forms while exposing non-conforming bodies to precarity. The same state apparatus that promotes “ease of doing business” and tourist influx manages populations by heightening vulnerability for those who refuse the commanded enjoyment.
This psychopolitics is potent because it operates at the level of desire rather than mere coercion. Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics, adapted here, highlights how digital and affective regimes exploit transparency and positivity. In Goa’s version, social media amplifies nationalist rituals and outrage cycles, sustaining the drive. Enjoyment spreads virally through festival celebrations, political rallies, and memes that mock the spectral “other.” The hauntological element deepens the hold: the past that refuses to die justifies perpetual mobilization.
Resistance demands responses that address this libidinal and biopolitical entanglement. Pure rational critique debunking policies or exposing contradictions often fails because it ignores the jouissance at stake. Effective responses must engage the spectral and the bodily.
First, reclaiming alternative enjoyments. Goan civil society can foster forms of jouissance not tethered to majoritarian nationalism: celebrations of syncretic culture, ecological belonging, linguistic pluralism, and local democratic experiments. This is not nostalgic multiculturalism but a deliberate production of supplementary enjoyment, the Lacanian “feminine” jouissance that exceeds phallic mastery. Art, literature, music, and grassroots festivals that affirm complexity over purity can haunt the hauntology in return, exposing the contingency of the dominant fantasy.
Second, forging new solidarities that cross the homo sacer divide. Minorities, activists, intellectuals, and journalists must build coalitions with disaffected sections within the majority youth facing joblessness, farmers losing land, or migrants caught in the same developmental machine. By revealing shared precarity beneath the nationalist enjoyment, these alliances weaken the fantasy of stolen jouissance. Legal and institutional strategies remain vital: strengthening regional safeguards, environmental jurisprudence, and press freedoms. However, these must be supplemented by affective strategies that make exclusion visible and shameful within the broader public.
Third, theoretical and practical de-hauntologization. This involves confronting ghosts directly rather than disavowing them. Public dialogues on Goa’s complex history, truth commissions of a sort, or educational curricula that embrace plurality can diminish the power of spectral anxiety. Politically, regional parties emphasizing Goan exceptionalism must evolve beyond reaction into affirmative visions that offer their own command to enjoy, a grounded, sustainable, plural enjoyment that competes libidinally with the national-religious imperative.
Finally, intellectuals and activists can deploy counter-psychopolitics: slow media, embodied protests, and community economies that prioritize use-value over spectacle. By refusing the speed of viral enjoyment and creating spaces of genuine reflection, mourning, collective care , they disrupt the superegoic circuit. The goal is not to eliminate enjoyment but to pluralize it, in Deleuzean sense, making room for lives that do not need to be sacrificed on the altar of national wholeness. It will bring to birth anti-Oedipus in our society
Goa’s small scale makes it a microcosm of larger Indian tensions. The superegoic command to enjoy nation and religion, rendered hauntological by colonial and regional specters, sustains political dominance while enacting biopolitical sorting. Minorities and dissidents become homo sacer not through overt camps but through graduated exclusion from the circle of enjoyers. Responses must be equally psychopolitical: theoretical clarity paired with affective and organizational creativity. Only by addressing the ghosts, redirecting the drive, and affirming multiple forms of life can Goa move beyond spectral imperatives toward a politics that sustains rather than sacrifices its diverse inhabitants.
