Canadian Truckers' Protest: Setting Lacan on His Feet?

Canadian Truckers' Protest:Setting Lacan on His Feet? Clint Burnham (bio) In 2022, a convoy of trucks traveled across Canada protesting COVID-19 vaccination mandates and gathering thousands of semitrailers, RVs, pickup trucks, and other vehicles before arriving in Ottawa on January 29. Ottawa is the capital of Canada, and semitrailers proceeded to occupy downtown streets near the federal legislature—the House of Commons—for more than two weeks, committing acts of disturbance large and small (from the desecration of a war monument and the harassment of mask-wearing residents to 24/7 airhorns and the setting up of hot tubs and bouncy castles). Spuriously linked to gilets jaunes protests—but also displaying Confederate flags and Nazi regalia—it was not exactly clear if protesters were in the majority even truck drivers. What was clear was the inability of local, provincial, and federal police to deal with the protesters (who were open about receiving back-channel information from police, former military, and national intelligence operatives); on February 14 the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act, and police cleared the protest on February 17, almost three weeks after its start. Solidarity protests at two major crossings into the US—in Alberta and Ontario—which had immense economic effects, were also cleared or disbanded (Wikipedia 2022). The convoy inspired similar actions or at least sympathy demonstrations as far away as New Zealand; like the January 6 riot a year earlier in DC, they offer us a way of thinking about COVID-era political actions as, I will argue, an example not simply of Hegel's rabble, of the deplorables that Oliver Davis and Tim Dean have cited in their Rancière-inspired Hatred of Sex (2022), but also of the "coincidence of opposites," whereby ideology functions via transgression and knowledge tangos with enjoyment. Before that, we should take account of an important Freudo-Lacanian argument with respect to jouissance and knowledge. Todd McGowan has provocatively argued that simple education will not work to eradicate racism, based as the latter is on jouissance, on the unconscious. As Freud (1957, 225) remarks, "If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, [End Page 413] listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine have upon hunger."1 To which McGowan adds, "If one tries to correct racist ideas by giving people better information, one inevitably fails because one does not touch the unconscious" (2022, 193–94n). Rather, anti-racist education of the "white fragility" sort triggers racists and racism alike and "regularly results," as Freud puts it, "in an intensification of the conflict in him and an exacerbation of his troubles." To this argument we can add a significant later concept of Lacan from his essay "Lituraterre," where he designates as the "littoral" the edge or beyond-limit between knowledge and enjoyment (the littoral or edge of river or ocean as the limit of the water; Lacan 2001).2 Jouissance, that is, is what lies beyond knowledge, which in this text, as often in later Lacan, designates not so much truth (which is only ever uncovered, it seems, in the analytic session but usually remains unconscious) as the "university discourse," the scientific register but also literary studies, psychology, and whatever else is the object of Lacan's wrath on a given day.3 McGowan and Lacan's arguments are instructive, however, for they help us understand the anti-vaxxers' alienation and their imperviousness to well-meaning education campaigns, whether of the top-down social media and state varieties or the more peer-based friends and family or family doctor. Essentially, both forms of education or knowledge—through personal contacts or the medium of the digital—come wrapped up in the psychic resonances of enjoyment, anxiety, disavowal, foreclosure, and the like. We are no more likely to listen to our family physician (leaving aside the number of folks who lack such primary care, whether due to medical insurance inequalities or sheer lack of family physicians or global health shortages) with...

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