Fantasy and the figure: ideological bodies in the Nordic Resistance Movement

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of fantasy has been afforded increased attention in psychoanalytic IR. While this scholarship does address bodies and fantasy, the appeal of fantasy to material bodies remains critically understudied. This paper contributes to this scholarship through a novel analysis of the Nordic Resistance Movement, arguing that the material body is a core part of its ideological discourse, and the latter cannot be understood without the former. This paper develops a framework that uses Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the figure to understand how fantasies relate to material bodies and uses this to offer a novel theorisation of the NRM. Through an analysis of the NRM’s fantasy of the Nordic Nation and, what I label, the Figure of the Norseman, this paper shows how collective ideological fantasies become grounded in present bodies to make such fantasies intelligible. Therefore, the paper demonstrates that, to understand an ideological fantasy, we must understand how it appeals to the body.