Trauma and the 'culture of excess' 45

like Singapore, traumatized by history of its own telling, it is only too tempting to turn to a political form in which conflict and division have no place, where national history is also the history of the ruling party under a leader of powerful personality. Lefort's meditation on European medieval kingship and the totalitarian regime is light years away from tropical Asia, yet it resonates with the problems that obsess the Singapore State. The island republic, like neighbouring Malaysia, has a Westminster parliamentary system of government. However many practices of its practice would be hard put to measure up against normal liberal-democratic standards. These practices, as it has been argued ad nauseam, are driven by the pragmatics of efficient government, and the need to modify an alien, European political form for Asian conditions. In a way, one cannot begrudge the argument. A postcolonial regime like Singapore had to start anew, and not be burdened by the old forms and practices. Some like compulsory acquisition of land for public housing at state-determined prices, and notably, and control of vehicle traffic by a huge tax levy on car ownership are clearly of benefit to the society. Political and administrative practicalities however do not exhaust the significance of the State's actions. Nation-building in Singapore often seems like the manufacturing of panacea against the imagination of impending doom. But it is also true that regional instability and political chaos created by radicals and religious fanatics alike are sometimes pressingly real. Communist insurgency, and more currently September 11 and the Bali bombing had proved that the State might have been right. Nonetheless when the national narrative is full of scenarios of doom, when perpetual crisis the central feature of the dark, anxious 'culture of excess', then what is real is already something of the over-wrought imagination. This mixture of invention and the real, one may say, gives the national narrative both social appeal and psychological urgency. The Singapore Story turns out to be a beast of uncertain will. It forewarns, and acts as a kind of pre-emptive strike, but it cannot do this without spicing up of all kind of details. The Singapore Story as trauma is merely the most colourful of the discursive invention. And what is the 'traumatic' except the experience that frightens and ensnares a person into an 'impossible history' , even as it spurs him into action. Viewed this way, the 'culture of excess' really suggests the State's need, not so much for totalitarianism as such, as for the ambition to achieve and utilize some of its formal features . For Lefort lively civil society and plural political visions are important ways of overcoming the terror of democracy's 'emptiness' . But he has no delusion

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