I’d like to write about how Brexit became the offer of a perfect shit.

How a political proposition has morphed from a negotiated compromise to a utopian promise. At the start of this process there was talk of Norway Plus, Super Canada, WTO Agreements and other oblique arrangements but now we are being offered a clean break. No mess. No fuss. Clean. Beautifully Clean. A perfect object which avoids the mess of reality.

Even the word Brexit sounds like defecating. We’ve publicly talked about a Hard Brexit about a Soft Brexit, the ease of passing so vital to the public discourse. What will it be like? Will it hurt? The offer of a hard Brexit began partly as something reality tested, one where the difficulties of the decision will be faced, something like this: ‘we know this is going to be disruptive, tricky, it will be a push and a strain, but we are ready to force it out’. Or the more timid Soft Brexit; ‘This will be soft, less trouble, a moist stool.’ It has now morphed into a perverse anal fantasy of a clean trip to the toilet, no wipe necessary.





Janine Chassegue-Smirgel’s in ‘Creativity in Perversion’ proposes that perversity is not some unique pathological sexual disorder but rather is something we are all capable of. It is a pre Oedipal splitting of the ego, a way of denying reality. For Smirgel one of the tragedies of the Oedipal crisis emerges out of the time lag of the infants desire for mother and their genital capability. During this time lag a small boy is confronted with the impotence of his penis as he becomes aware of the sexual capabilities of his parents.

His smallness is brought into focus. In order to manage this anxiety about his smallness and incapability a regression in fantasy can occur, a perverse temptation is sought. A site where the pain of failure in genital coupling can be mentally avoided such as the anal stage. Here our mental fantasies can take difference and complexity and grind them, merge them to generate an object of brown sameness. We are omnipotent again, we can forget about the hard to manage complexities of the primal scene. Inadequacies about the state of our genital reality are offered as a way out in fantasy with an anal process. With this avoided our perverse functioning celebrates; ‘look at this shit, look at how I made this merged and digested object! I can take things in and birth them out through my anus with creative ease! I am an artist!’

You feel robbed and castrated but you are the master of your own bowels, your shit more potent than semen. Your anus a womb. Take back control.





A regression is also offered with Brexit, to an earlier time where Britain is strong, omnipotent, thrusting, phallically functional. If only we could untether ourselves from the rules of the father, in this case the rules of the EU, we could return to this powerful state. But now we have moved beyond this - it is not simply a killing of the father, it is a denial of the father, or a denial of the other.









Give us a clean break! It will be perfect! The other does not exist! The promise is that we can do without the other, we can generate it all by ourselves, no messy dependancy because remember we hold a creative power. Alone we can make the perfect shit.









It is a utopian offer. The offer denies Britain's small castrated reality. Men like Nigel Farrage must be allowed to leave the EU, they must be allowed to realise perfection. The break will be clean, it will be fresh, it will be perfect. I am reminded of Marion Milner’s ‘Hands of the Living God’.













The book is an account of a psychotherapeutic treatment of a young schizophrenic woman who begins to draw frequently and bring the images to show Milner. Milner starts to become aware that her patient is attempting to convince her that her shit is actually a baby, a regressed proposition, one of defiance of genital creativity.





Look! People see! It is possible! Father says we cannot have this perfect thing! He is obstructing perfection with the mess of reality, with the gross muddle of complexities! I promise you a perfect object, an evacuation.





Here Farage is engaged in a similar argument. He is promising us a baby. A gleaming future, something simple and beautiful. What image do you have in your head of a perfect future? A gleaming tower block of glass and steel? A Regency house? Britain's past restored to a former glory or reborn as a modern powerhouse? It doesn't matter it’s whatever you want. And the birth will be simple; the future will slip out with no fuss. There will be no mess, it will be so clean. No need for fucking, no need for birthing. It will come out perfectly, no crying, no screaming. A perfect shit.