Description
This paper argues that, in the context of the current global dislocation of the post-WWII liberal project, the inter-subjective constitution of political support to far-right leaders can be understood as the outcome of a temporary symbiosis between emotionally unsettled societal actors and political leaders, which have both embraced fantasy narratives about the nation as shared objects of desire, leading to the normalisation of far-right policies, discourses and set of practices. At times of unsettling ontological insecurities, narratives about the nation may coalesce to form a unified and exclusionary autobiographical account of nationhood through the psychic mechanism I conceptualise as ‘symbiotic enjoyment’. The notion relates to processes whereby social groups’ emotional needs become intertwined with national symbols, while the image of the leader and the nation-state are also blended. Both the leader and the followers attribute their feelings of ontological insecurity to common obstacles, the ‘enemies of the nation’, and share in their enjoyment. I focus on the examples of Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil, and Narendra Modi, in India, to empirically substantiate the claim that the psychic mechanism of symbiotic enjoyment, deriving from amalgamated fantasies of national belonging, provides a compelling logic to understand the appeal of far-right political projects.
