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Fear and Anxiety: The Nationalist and Racist Politics of Fantasy

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Abstract

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy.

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Notes

  1. In this text, I speak of racist identity politics, which must be kept separate from progressive identity politics, which is committed to emancipation, liberation and equality and which asserts a particular identity against the unjust system to articulate experiences of oppression, exploitation and marginalization and brings particular subjects together. Progressive identity politics may also be based on strategic essentialism or non-essentialism. Even though I consider a political subject as the process of subjectivation in the interval between identities that participates in universality, my critique is aimed exclusively at racist identity politics.

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  1. Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Ari Hirvonen

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  1. Ari Hirvonen
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Hirvonen, A. Fear and Anxiety: The Nationalist and Racist Politics of Fantasy. Law Critique 28, 249–265 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9210-y

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