Keele Research Repository

Taking cue from Foucault’s Society Must be Defended and drawing on the Lacanian concept of fantasy this paper puts forwards an analytic of in/security by focusing on the fantasy of congruency of state, nation and society. I argue that this ideal of congruency is fantasmatic, as it offers an impossible-possibility of congruency, fullness and security that can never be attained and that thus continuously strives to materialise itself whilst including its own failure, the obstacle. Insecurity is thus directly linked to the fantasy of congruency since every fantasmatic narrative about the promised fullness of the body national/social must entail an Other, standing in our way to achieve our promised congruency. To illustrate this analytic of in/security I interrogate two key discursive practices through which state, nation and society are rendered congruent and how this congruency is legitimated via, indeed entails, a myriad of in/security strategies.