Description
This paper offers a reading of how far-right groups produce desires for different kinds of subjectivity, through focussing on positive, native, and ambivalent emotional discourses. Subjectivity is a heavily theorised and contested concept; this paper positions subjectivity as something that is desired which manifests in different forms in different contexts. I suggest that different kinds of far-right subjectivities are attached to different emotions, both positive and negative. Thus, this paper looks to different emotion-derived subjectivities and asks what this means for understanding far-right politics.
I draw on the scholarship of Lyotard to argue that the desire for subjectivity is more than individual, it is part of a libidinal economy where emotions are mobile and desire structures collective behaviour. This paper suggests that there are multiple far-right fantasies of subjectivity that relate to structural feelings of relief, satisfaction, and destruction. I argue that each of these emotions is reflective of a desire for certain subjectivities. It is only when understood through frameworks of desire that we can see why individuals would seek a subjectivity premised upon the destruction of their own identity, something which is commonplace in far-right discourse.
