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The Nation/State Fantasy pp 41–65Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Nation/State Fantasy: From Gellner to Lacan

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Abstract

This chapter puts forth the book’s analytical framework in two parts. The first part engages critically with Ernest Gellner’s theory of nationalism and particularly his theorisation of cultural homogeneity and nation/state congruency. This part demonstrates the problems with Gellner’s thought, namely his functionalist approach and his ‘presentist’ and totalising reading of modern history that renders nationalism as inevitable and necessary for the project of modernity. The second part stipulates this book’s Lacanian psychoanalytical framework as it articulates the concepts of lack/void, the split subject and fantasy. This part demonstrates the utility of the Lacanian architecture to understand better how the ideal of congruent societies has become a leitmotiv in modern political thought and IR theory.

Nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state—a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation—should not separate the power-holders from the rest.

(Ernest Gellner 2006[1983]: 1)

As a matter of fact, the modern idea of the nation is not even on the horizon of classical thought, and it is not merely the fortunes of a word that demonstrate this to us.

(Jacques Lacan)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/28021602.pdf [accessed 26 March 2019].

  2. 2.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/24/stiffen-your-sinews-and-vote-leave%2D%2D-brexit-will-make-britain-gr2/ [accessed 26 March 2019].

  3. 3.

    See Laclau (2006: especially 109–110, 2004: 279–328), Mouffe (2000: 95). This book, however, deploys the Lacanian jouissance as part of fantasy, rather than focusing on bodily enjoyment and interpellation, two key concepts in the Lacanian framework I have used elsewhere (Mandelbaum 2012, 2018).

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  1. School of Social, Political and Global Studies, Keele University, Keele, UK

    Moran M. Mandelbaum

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Mandelbaum, M.M. (2020). The Nation/State Fantasy: From Gellner to Lacan. In: The Nation/State Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22918-4_2

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