Freud's most sustained and chilling figure for humans in civilization is not bridled animals, but "conquered cities." The superego, he says in Civilization and Its Discontents, obtains mastery of our dangerous desires by weakening, disarming, and watching over them "like a garrison in a conquered city." The homology is the classic one between soul and city; the figure of man and his psyche is relentlessly political.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 193