This interview is based on Pasko Kisić-Merino’s PhD thesis ‘Enjoying the Fall: The Normalisation of the Far-Right as an Algorithmically-Mediated Fantasy of Ontological (In)Security‘
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Core to your thesis, Enjoying the Fall, is the concept of ontological (in)security. Could you tell us a little more about it?
Ontological security is both an analytical concept and a field of study (ontological security studies – OSS), which the work of Anthony Giddens and Robert Laing has most prominently informed. In its original – and most widespread – form, ontological security refers to a feeling of constituting a continuous self in the world, particularly one afflicted by diverse crises and sociopolitical upheavals. In these situations, our narratives of “self” – concerning ourselves and our spaces of belonging – can be challenged by material and emotional conditions and experiences, like war, socioeconomic deprivation, climate-related catastrophes, and exclusionary violence (e.g., racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, etc.). So, if “(in)security” is broadly associated with identifiable material threats, ontological (in)security has more to do with the emotional turmoil resulting from being unable or powerless to sustain a continuous self – i.e., with how we form and concoct meaning in and about ourselves. Importantly, ontological security, while distinct from material security, engages with its deeper, unconscious, emotional, and existential layers.
However, and following the work of Catarina Kinnvall, Christopher Browning, and Jakub Eberle, among others, my specific approach to ontological security mobilises Lacanian psychoanalysis to criticise the Giddensian approach while not fully disavowing it. The key point of divergence rests on the matters of subjectivity and objectivity. First, while Giddens and Laing (as well as other prominent OSS scholars) refer to the subject as “being” – broadly speaking, as a fixed entity –, a Lacanian approach rather sees the subject as lacking and, thus, perennially becoming. This is a key distinction, since Lacanian OSS scholars see the subject as desiring yet being ultimately unable to affix itself to any particular (and usually desired) identity. Indeed, Lacan and his interpreters do not understand the subject as we commonly would (e.g., an individual or self), but rather as lack, which triggers a ceaseless yet impossible effort to fill this lack. In entering the world of language and norms, the child abandons its pre-Symbolic wholeness and thus becomes “split”, trying to fill in a resulting lack. This impermanence precisely evidences and produces a potent desire for wholeness (e.g., of a specific, vitriolic reactionary identity against a “threatening” other) that can, however, never be fully attained. Lack can never be fulfilled both because of the limits of language – i.e., it is in the sociosymbolic realm where we seek fulfillment – and due to lack triggering the desire that constitutes us as subjects in the first place. In other words, obliterating lack would mean ceasing to desire, which would entail the destruction of the subject.
Second, and briefly, another major contribution from Lacanian psychoanalysis to political research (and OSS, in particular) stems from its “twin” notion of the object. The lacking subject can only attempt to “fill in” its primordial lack with that which exists in the sociopolitical – i.e., to represent itself in/via the social (e.g., as reactionary ideologies promise us). However, the objective field of representation (Lacan’s Symbolic order – the realm of language, norms, and culture) precisely cannot fulfil the perennially-lacking subject because of the void or “negative totality” formed by that which cannot be symbolised in/by language (i.e., the Lacanian “Real”). The Real precisely reveals the Symbolic Order’s limits and radical hollowness and, thus, the ultimate incapacity and failure of its structures and attachments to quench the subject’s lack fully.
This twin structure lies precisely at the core of ontological security. It is the political subject (e.g., a MAGA supporter, or the movement at large) that attempts to fulfil their lack through fantasies of ontological (in)security (e.g., “stop the Steal!”) structured by the Symbolic order or field of representation (e.g., the reactionary, racist, and xenophobic MAGA narratives governing belonging to the US). However, the point here is that these Symbolically-structured fantasies inevitably break down, leaving the subject in disarray (i.e., ontological insecurity) yet in continuous search for impossible-to-attain fulfilment (i.e., ontological security). Paradoxically, it is the Real limit/breakage of fantasy (and, thus, ideology) – i.e., that which reveals the hollowness of the objective – that fuels further political mobilisation in the subject insofar as it can provide the latter with sufficient enjoyment. We can see this in the undead-like relentlessness of neoliberalism, in its capacity to “reinvent” itself far beyond self-destructive historical contradictions (i.e., moments revealing its objective hollowness). Neoliberalism’s ontological insecurity precisely helps explain its superficially disavowed yet libidinal relationship with far-right politics, which provides it with an apparently new, yet obscene horizon of representation that fuels its shambling on.
While I am severely simplifying things here, these dynamic, radical, and anti-essentialist conceptualisations of the subject(ive) and object(ive) under Lacanian psychoanalysis provide a powerful analytical framework to study the power, appeal, and ultimate impossibility of reactionary politics. The structure of Lacanian OSS thus allows us to study and interpret political phenomena around this incessant movement towards the impossible foreclosure of our identities and desires. While this reality leaves us frustrated and unfulfilled, paradoxically, it acts as the necessary emotional fuel that feeds the kiln of (reactionary) political life.
Psychoanalytic theory and critical fantasy studies more precisely are core to your research. Could you tell us how they help us understand the current reactionary moment?
Perhaps the concept of Lacanian ontological security (and the short discussion on the Lacanian subject and object!) provides an early entry into the contributions of psychoanalytic theory and critical fantasy studies. Stemming from Sigmund Freud but far closer to the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, the key concepts related to our reactionary moment (if not epoch) are those of the subject, fantasy, and enjoyment.
Without going into (more) painful detail of their vast theoretical approaches, the Lacanian subject is one mired in a constant process of becoming, ceaselessly redefining its identity and relation with others (and the world at large) as symbolic commitments and fantasmatic edifices also mutate. In the critical context of democratic “erosion” or the fall of the modern liberal order, this means that the anxious subject attempts constantly at grasping at powerful signifiers of belonging and identity – like the nation, the group, or the “race”/phenotype – to secure its fickle “place” in the world (cf. ontological security). Identities and belonging, however, are dialectically formed against others, particularly if perceived as threatening to the ontological security of the subject.
As one may expect, this structure becomes particularly evident in far-right discourses that excoriate and brutalise the other that “threatens” their “rightful” stability and that of their cherished signifier – the socialist, the Muslim, the feminist, the transgender person, etc. These powerful and essentialist constructions of “the people” (of belonging) and “the other” (of difference and exclusion) are necessarily embedded in reactionary fantasies organising the otherwise ungraspable Symbolic Order. For instance, take the fantasies of the “pure” Swedish nation, the “lawless immigrant”, and the “protection of Swedish women”. These are critical ideological formations that become intimately associated, effectively co-constituting loci of both identity and power, and shaping our relation to both material (e.g., in welfare chauvinism) and emotional conditions. In this sense, fantasy should not be understood as “illusion”, but rather the narrative – e.g., identity, nation, belonging, even the “self” – that provides meaning to the otherwise unfathomable Symbolic structure marked (or barred) by the Real.
These fantasies, in turn, structure how subjects engage with politics not only out of reason, “logic”, and reflexivity, but rather concerning the unconscious power of enjoyment. For Lacan, the unconscious does not refer to some “inner world” (Lacan and his interpreters rejected ego-psychology due to its essentialism), but rather to the ungraspable working of the Symbolic Order through us as subjects. In that line, and also following Slavoj Žižek, Yannis Stavrakakis, Derek Hook, and Jason Glynos, enjoyment (or jouissance) is a quintessentially political structure rather than an “inner” emotion or affect. Jouissance is a form of painful, transgressive, and excessive enjoyment operating according to our fantasies. It goes beyond the acceptable boundaries set by our (liberal) Symbolic Order – think about the “Sieg Heil” moment of Elon Musk – and (painfully) reveals our fragile commitment to it. Since it is because of the existence, power, and our commitment to the Symbolic norm or “law” that we can enjoy its transgression. Jouissance is precisely experienced in those numerous yet apparently “isolated”, excessive moments of deep contradiction with what we claim to uphold – e.g., rationality, tolerance, reflexivity, etc – according to the fantasies of ontological security that provide sense to our fickle political existence. This reactionary moment and its consequences, I believe, can be analysed and experienced in this “tide” of jouissance. Importantly, this tide not only stems from the far-right, but its obscene power is related to “mainstream” liberals and conservatives actively contributing to it through the intoxicating space of AI-fuelled social media.
Your thesis focuses in particular on the role of social media and AI and the role they play in the normalisation of far-right politics. It paints a rather dark picture of what you term ‘the fall of Empire’. Is there any positive way out?
I was asked something very similar during my public defence, which was followed by a long, perhaps ominous silence. I will try to give a better answer here, less focused on the technological and regulatory angles (which are also key!) and more on the broader scope of the unconscious consequences of this dark horizon.
I think that the issue, space, and techno-emotional medium of social media allow for a unique understanding of how we form ideological commitments and how these endure – especially, that of reactionary subjects and discourses. The level of vitriol and the consequences of systematic reactionary (particularly, far-right) hate and brutalisation on social media vastly exceeds the logic of entertainment, which is simultaneously welding it to our understanding of politics and social identities. After dedicating five years to researching these harrowing topics, I am perhaps closer to a techno-pessimist perspective, having informed my understanding of technology through critical approaches like those of Andrew Feenberg, Wendy Chun, Christian Fuchs, and Simon Lindgren. While they differ in some aspects, they broadly agree on the notion that technology is not (and has never been) some “neutral” tool or platform but, rather, constitutes an inextricably political ontology and discourse shaping (neoliberal) social reality.
In that sense, the issue of social media – the main technological object and space of analysis in my work – does not entail a “way out” without tackling the rot-prone relationship between neoliberalism, capital, and the far-right. This ontologically-securitising relationship lies at the material, emotional, and (thus) ideological kernel of the modern liberal order – the falling Empire. Here I perhaps side with Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean, and Jacob Johanssen. They invite us to understand the inextricability of these systems while nudging a painful yet necessary reckoning with our cherished fantasies in order to attempt to transcend them. They simultaneously warn us of the recurrent folly of trying to tackle, e.g., regulation alone without a radical change in its availing structure – this, I would argue, is precisely a form of liberal, post-political ontological security.
The notion of hopelessness (similarly yet not identically to Žižek) here becomes a political rallying banner not of submission or nihilism, since hope is inextricably marked by the fantasy of our modern liberal order. Hopelessness, rather, implies a severe break and a reckoning that the fantasies and imaginaries linking politics to technology should stem from a coordinate other than the horizon of (neo)liberal modernity, and that those fantasies will inevitably break – a process that we can learn to cherish rather than repress and sublimate through reactionary violence, exclusion, and sheer brutality. In this sense, for better or worse, there is no “way out”, but multiple, convoluted possibilities that involve a constant, relentless, and hopeless reckoning that – I firmly believe – should be guided by equality, justice, and solidarity. Perhaps Antonio Gramsci proposes an ideal approach to face rather than succumb to the ontological insecurity produced by the obscene, reactionary welding of politics and technology: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.
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Pasko Kisić-Merino is a Researcher for the PLEDGE Horizon Project (Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance) at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden and a member of the RPRN. He obtained his PhD in Political Science at Karlstad University and is the former editorial manager for the journal Political Psychology. His main research addresses the intersection of far-right politics, identity formation, neoliberalism, and social media through a Lacanian ontological security approach. His current research focuses on unearthing the emotional dynamics and implications of grievance politics in Europe, and their tenuous relationship with liberal democracy.
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