Fantasy Fatigue: On Political Autopoiesis and the Administration of Enjoyment (original) (raw)
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Culture, Theory and Critique, 2018
Fantasies and especially excessive or ‘phantascistic’ fantasies, as they are referred to here, have the power to suppress within political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, inner antagonisms in times of crisis. More precisely, they help to blur aporias within the ideological structures of a community through the evocation of a sensus communis (Kant) that establishes the community anew, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the space of reasons is analysed in this article as one that does not take part in the game of giving and asking for reasons, but operates in the background of communal reason via an emotionally and clandestine ‘code’ of what it means to be ‘We … – We who we are’. Next to theoretical elaborations of how and why these phantascistic fantasies are produced, the theory will be further explained through a series of exemplifications demonstrating the way that it has played out across a long history of conflict in the Middle East and a shorter history of contemporary politics in the United States. Through all of this, the aim is to illustrate how very concrete excessive fantasies have an impact on a body politic’s form of enjoyment. Key-words: Political Enjoyment, normative orders, 'nightly law', sensus communis, Eichmann-trial, jouissance
Fantasy as a Political Category
Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory [preprint], 2018
This chapter examines Žižek’s theorizations of ‘ideological fantasy’ and its different manifestations or veils (Žižek 1997: 1-35). We begin (part 1) by recalling the fundamental coordinates of Freud’s, then Lacan’s, conceptions of fantasy, allowing a theoretical lineage to be established which accounts for Žižek’s coaptation and extension of what was originally a clinical term. Part 2 then turns, in this light, to Žižek’s reformulation of ‘fantasy’ in the context of a post-Marxian theory of ideology. First, we pursue Žižek’s critique of the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’, by way of his famous analyses of ideological cynicism, into his theory of ideological disidentification, and the function of ideological fantasy in structuring groups’ quasi-transgressive forms of jouissance. Second, we look at Žižek’s analyses of sublime objects of ideology, and the function of ideological fantasy in papering over social antagonism or ‘the Real’ by constructing narratives of the loss or theft of jouissance. As an avenue for future research, we show just how well and powerfully Žižek’s theory allows us to comprehend contemporary Right-wing populism as an ideological formation.
The political nature of fantasy and political fantasies of nature
Journal of Language and Politics, 2021
Within post-structuralist discourse theory, there has been an ongoing interest in fantasy and the fantasmatic logic. We propose a new way forward and suggest a focus on fantasies of 'nature' and what is deemed 'natural'. Fantasies are structurally entwined with language, desire, and political ontolo-gies. Discourses of nature hold a privileged position in this entwinement. We use the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to explore how symbolic engagement with the world is supported by fantasmatic mechanisms. We argue that political fantasies express political subjects and objects via the imaginary mechanisms of splitting and projection. In an era of ecological crises and global pandemics, we find that fantasies that create a split between nature and society are a central part of the transformation of political imaginaries and discourses. Studying fantasies of various "naturecul-tures" and the politics of nature is thus an important new direction for discourse theory to explore anti-essentialist ontologies.
Fantasy and Identity in Critical Political Theory
Filozofski vestnik, 2011
In this essay I explore the appeal of the psychoanalytic category of fantasy for critical political theory, by which I mean a theory grounded in a political ontology that offers a rationale for both normative and ideological critique. I draw on the work of William Connolly, Susan Faludi, Jacqueline Rose, and Judith Butler, among others, to consider the explanatory and critical implications of the concept of fantasy for questions of identity, and political identity in particular. I argue that fantasy is a useful device with which to explore and probe the political and ideological aspects of a practice or narrative because it foregrounds the combined significance of the symbolic and affective dimensions of life. Moreover, a psychoanalytic perspective can facilitate a move away from an epistemological or moralizing understanding of fantasy and political identity, shifting the emphasis instead toward a more ontological and ethical understanding.
The dysphoric body politic, or Seizing the means of imagination
Transformative Works & Cultures, 2020
Although escapism has been used pejoratively in describing fandom, it might be reframed as a reaction to untenable external circumstances. This reformulation of escapism is a starting point for examining how fan fiction is a political practice. In light of the political upheaval in the United States as well as the existential threat of climate change, this is a topical, even urgent, collective project for producing survivable conditions. Fan fiction uniquely diagnoses and imagines alternatives to oppressive political conditions. The lens of political dysphoria, adapted from critical transgender studies and used here to describe the dissonance between dominant political structures and desiring subjects, permits exploration of how fan fiction enables subjects to acknowledge oppressive political conditions, engage in coalitional rebellion, and reimagine societal structures for collective liberation.
Journal of Political Ideologies, 2008
This paper explores the normative and ideological significance of fantasy in the context of workplace practices. I situate my approach to fantasy against the background of a ‘logics approach’ to social analysis, which is grounded in the post-structuralist and post-marxist genres of political theorizing. In considering a number of existing analyses of workplace practices which appeal to the category of fantasy, I focus on some studies in which fantasy can be said to play a role in sustaining workplace practices. I use this literature to draw out and formalize some basic features of the logic of fantasy, before turning my attention to a study which opens up a theoretical space for thinking about a mode of subjectivity which appears to escape the constraining logic of fantasy. Finally, using the insights gleaned from these studies, I develop an analytical framework centred around the logic of fantasy. The benefit of this framework, I claim, is that it makes clear the analytical distinction between two aspects of critique and transformation: an aspect linked to the norms of a practice and an aspect linked to the way subjects engage with those norms. Making this distinction explicit, I argue, allows us to pose interesting theoretical, critical, and methodological questions, including how these two aspects intersect in different contexts. The aim is to pluralize understandings of social and political critique and transformation, in a way which is relevant (but not necessarily tied) to workplace practices.
Journal of Language and Politics, 2021
Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the category of fantasy, from a theoretical point of view. Importantly, however, I also argue that the qualification 'critical' in Critical Fantasy Studies captures something about how such studies can draw out the normative, ideological, and politico-strategic implications of psychoanalytic insights and observations, and thus become part of a broader enterprise in critical theoretical and empirical research.
Political Fantasy as a Form of Ideology - the Polish Case
The Interlocutor. Journal of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas, 2017
Modern Polish political thought was marked by the historical trauma that was the loss of statehood and its territorial partition between European empires. The article shows two examples of political thought – the first from the 19th -century tradition romantic messianism, the second from early 20th century nationalism – as reactions to this trauma. These examples are reconstructed as complex fantasies that work according to specific 'economies' of meaning and satisfaction. Messianism operated by way of identification with the position of the victims of political violence and sought symbolic gratification in making suffering meaningful. Nationalism tried to introduce Polish people into a realist vision of politics by glorifying domination and violence in pursuit of the interests of the national community. Both positions are ideologies in the strong sense of the notion: being not only political doctrines, they constitute points of strong attachments, but each of them is also caught in a specific impasse.