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.

Introduction: fantasy and the role of the body

A united Nordic Nation would secure the independence of the Nordic people and facilitate their racial and cultural survival.

(Nordic Resistance Movement, 2018: 18)

The above quote is taken from the manifesto of the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a Nordic Neo-Nazi organisation, and it is a stark statement of extremist political ambition. The NRM’s manifesto sets out a fantasy of a future polity, the Nordic Nation, wherein its chosen people live in peace and security in physical and psychological senses. The NRM sees traditional security-as-survival of individual bodies as a necessity, while manufacturing a desire for the stability and protection of (racialised) identity. Therefore, the body (as a site of identity), fantasy, and ideology become intertwined in NRM thought, thought that informs troubling and violent activism. Therefore, this paper asks how do NRM members make sense of the Nordic Nation when it does not yet exist? Furthermore, how can we understand NRM members’ understandings of their bodies in relation to the Nordic Nation.

Through an analysis of the NRM’s online English-language media, this paper develops a framework for understanding the interplay between bodies and fantasies when studying far-right politics. Far-right politics is diverse, but a common theme is that, either implicitly or explicitly, the body features extensively in far-right ideological fantasies. Crucially, I contend that IR scholarship on fantasy has not appropriately addressed how fantasy, especially fantasies of future home(lands), appeals to past and present bodies. In essence, we lack a framework for understanding the place of bodies in ideological fantasies and this paper develops such a framework. The NRM is an especially pertinent foundation for this framework because of its explicit centring of past and present bodies in its ideological treatises. Therefore, we can better comprehend the intellectual underpinnings of the NRM’s violent and extremist ideology (without which the political constitution of the group cannot be understood) by developing a framework for interrogating the role and appeal of the body in ideological fantasies. Simultaneously the NRM can serve as the bedrock for this framework that may have applications to politics beyond the NRM and, perhaps, beyond the far-right.

IR scholarship has devoted much attention to the concept of fantasy in Lacanian (Arfi, 2010; Eberle, 2019; Mandelbaum, 2020; Solomon, 2015) and Kleinian terms (Gellwitzki, 2025; Gellwitzki and Houde, 2023). These psychoanalytic approaches refer to embodiment as related to fantasy, but I contend that this can be developed further by advancing scholarship beyond socio-linguistic framings. Using the case of the NRM, I argue that the interrelation of bodies and fantasy requires greater exploration to understand how present bodies can relate to future fantasies. In Lacanian senses, fantasy is a necessary concept for understanding notions of the ‘real’ and ‘desire’ (Ormrod, 2014; Žižek, 2019). Fantasy is where we position and stage our desire (Ormrod, 2014: 112), and fantasy structures our understanding of reality. Fantasy allows for a mitigation of the effects of anxiety by directing subjects towards certain purposes or objects (Eberle, 2019), but these objects are always unobtainable; these objects provide purposes to existence, but achievement is always their deferred.

This paper advances this literature by exploring the role of materiality and arguing that fantasies necessarily address material bodies in both ideological and individual discourses. By understanding fantasy and desire as intertwined with materiality, we can interrogate the structural dimensions of fantasies and read these through their appeal to embodied subjects. To offer an analysis of the NRM that addresses these concepts and dynamics, I draw on the scholarship of Jean-François Lyotard. Posed as a critique of Lacan, Lyotard’s reading of desire sees it as a site of production akin to a factory instead of a stage (Mowitt, 2011: xx). I suggest that Lyotard’s understanding of phantasy ¹ and libidinal economy is essential in understanding the structural relationship between fantasy and bodies.

Fantasy is often located in an inaccessible position, but one that is imagined to be accessible eventually, hence it functions as a motivator for action. Yet, fantasy must be made intelligible for its effects to be felt in the present; in some cases, it may be appropriate for a fantasy to be an aethereal or idealised concept, such as ‘freedom’, but fantasies require some attachment to the material plane. I suggest that IR can go further in understanding the appeal and grounding of fantasies outside of discursive socio-linguistic framings, such as a Lacanian symbolic order, especially in relation to bodies. Without a sensitivity to bodies and how they would feel, if a fantasy were achieved, then it is not clear how a fantasy appeals to a subject in the first place. To address this tension, I use Lyotard’s (2011) concept of the figure as a means of grounding discourse in a materiality and bodies. While originally posed as a ‘critique’, in this case I use Lyotard to supplement Lacanian approaches to the body in relation to fantasy, through the figure and structural notions of desire.

Fundamentally, I argue that contemporary understandings of fantasy in IR do not adequately address collective embodied fantasies, especially those related to notions of home, and a Lyotard-inspired approach can remedy this. To demonstrate how collective fantasies appeal to bodies in the present, I provide an analysis of the NRM’s English language media, that shows how its political projects are fundamentally reliant on the relationship between fantasy and the body. The concept of the figure allows us to grasp how the ideological, material, and fantastical interact through the body; without this, our understanding of far-right politics will not account for the central role of the body in far-right ideology and structures of desire. Therefore, I bring together two means of supplementing existing approaches to fantasy, namely conceptually centring the materiality of past and present bodies in fantastical discourses on the future and introducing Lyotard’s scholarship on structural desire and the figure to do this.

With these aims, this paper is structured as follows: I first set out the empirical case of the NRM and outline how contemporary understandings of fantasy cannot conceptualise the NRM’s politics. Following this, I break down the constituent issues of how fantasy has been presented in IR. Then, I turn to the interplay between discourse and materiality when it comes to constructing the body. Following this, I make the case for understanding fantasy as fitting within a Lyotard-inspired reading of discourse. I then expand upon the concept of the figure and bring it in relation to fantasy. Through the NRM’s clear and stated fantastical discourse, the interplay between bodies, fantasy and the figure are drawn together.

The Nordic Resistance Movement and alternative fantasies

The Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) is a pan-Nordic ‘National Socialist’ movement (NRM Website, 2019g). Building the Nordic Nation, a future state and home(land) for all (white) Nordic peoples, is the NRM’s purpose (Nordic Resistance Movement, 2018). The Nordic Nation is a place free of the NRM’s perceived societal ills, as it is fundamentally white with no possibility of migration and citizenship for people of colour. Furthermore, it is heteronormative, without electoral politics, non-environmentally exploitative, free from global capitalism, antisemitic, and a welfarist state (Nordic Resistance Movement, 2018: 12, 16, 18, 21, 27, 29, 33, 43, 45). Regarding gender in the NRM and Nordic Nation, Askanius (2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2022) has argued that women often act as ‘recruiters’ for the organisation. Women are taken to engage in self-discipling practices to make the NRM’s Neo-Nazism more desirable (Askanius, 2022: 6) and friendly-faced (Askanius, 2021a: 17) to potential recruits. Furthermore, Askanius (2021b: 148) argues that the organisation deploys humorous tactics and manufactures memes in order to appeal to members and potential recruits through levity and enjoyment. Therefore, NRM media is used to communicate its political project, albeit in a sanitised format, and provides a vital resource for understanding its politics.

It is in the memes that we can see hints at the NRM’s embodied politics, namely a reverential treatment and reproduction of Norse Viking figures. Kølvraa (2019) has offered a visual, and Viking-focussed approach to the NRM, drawing attention to the identification processes that NRM members have with Vikings. Kølvraa (2019: 282) argues that the NRM manufactures and uses Viking heritage to directly relate its members to a nostalgic past and reassert the importance of embodied (hyper)masculinity. In this paper, I argue that these figures go beyond their status as memes and are fundamental in understanding how the NRM positions and relates its members to its ideological fantasies. What I term the ‘figure of the Norseman’ requires specific attention; I label the concept this way, to differentiate it with Kølvraa’s (2019) ‘figure of the Viking’, but also because the ‘Norseman’ better encapsulates religious and mythological dimensions, a point to which I return later in this section.

The NRM’s claims power to ‘demand that a physically unfit recruit should exercise, just as an uneducated person should educate themselves’ (Lindberg, 2020), and requires ‘resistance men’ to take part in physical fitness tests (NRM Website, 2018). The Activist Test takes place regularly in NRM nests ² and includes a wide variety of strength, cardiovascular and combative fitness activities (NRM Website, 2019a, 2019c, 2019d, 2021). This is a mandated and structured biopolitics that is fundamentally future-orientated; an ‘unfit recruit’ is recruited to do ‘something’ in the future and by this point, the lack of fitness will have been overcome. Indeed, this ‘something’ is the active production and realisation of a fantasy. Wilhelmsen (2021) argues that Vikings inform the ‘future total renewal’ (p. 288) of man and the so-called Nordic Nation; this future is fantastical, and the Viking allows this to be rendered intelligible and knowable through an appeal to the knowable bodies of past Vikings. Kølvraa (2019) explicitly uses the term ‘figure of the Viking’, which is also the basis of Wilhelmsen’s (2021) work on the NRM, but neither address the concept of the figure. In response to Kølvraa’s (2019) work, I suggest focussing on the figure of the Norseman, the NRM’s central figure which brings together bodies, ideological fantasies, and material structures of desire.

The NRM media calls its members ‘resistance men’, ‘resistance women’ and ‘activists’ (Nordic Resistance Movement, 2018). The NRM regularly employs white victimhood narratives, whereby ‘protecting’ white Nordic people becomes the aim of the resistance man. This is not an inference, NRM-made banners regularly refer to ‘White Genocide’ and ‘Racial Replacement’ (NRM Website, 2019e). ‘Resistance men’ (NRM Website, 2019f, 2020b, 2020c) have extreme levels of masculinity mapped onto their bodies. These masculine bodies are highly visible in their performance of activism in everyday spaces; while there may be different identities, the routines they undertake, and the name under which they fall, are uniform. It is necessary to address the appearance of NRM members because the NRM’s understanding of identity is fundamentally embodied and perceptible; following the modernist trend of using ‘vision’ as an ordering tool (Epstein, 2021: 220), identity is taken to be ‘biological’ (Nordic Resistance Movement, 2018).

When a group is so concerned about protecting identity, and ‘biological’ readings of it, the body becomes a central feature of knowing oneself and envisioning stability of that knowing process. Perception itself is informed by worldviews (Goodrick-Clarke, 2003; Ormrod, 2014), of which we can include (ideological) fantasy, so understanding the valuation of identity based on perception still requires an unpacking of NRM fantasies. Fantasy does not have to be a conscious formation for it to inform, or be constituent of, a worldview; fantasy’s presence, as related to relieving anxiety, can do many things, such as showing desire within a symbolic order (Lacan, 2007), or as part of discourses that exist beyond language (Lyotard, 2011). The latter is especially important here because the material grounding of fantasy is central when assessing fantasies related to bodies. The desire for stable identity is a motivator in individual and group action (Giddens, 1993; Steele, 2008), and the perceived threat to understanding identity through the idea that identity can be socially constructed existentially challenges the NRM’s worldview.

Thus, a solution to mitigate this anxiety is needed; in this case, a special fantasy related to a body that can alleviate the anxiety. This paper argues that this fantasy is necessarily tied to a projected image of the body because a fantastical body, when read through the lens of the figure, is something to which we can relate by understanding that body in relation to our own. There are similarities between Lyotard’s figure and a Lacanian mirror stage, but there are points of distinction on which I will elaborate later. Perception and worldviews can be constructed intersubjectively, but it is worth noting that fantastical concepts are often mobilised by far-right groups. Kisic Merino and Kinnvall (2023) argue that ‘the far-right has successfully weaponised paranoid mindsets and narcissistic fantasies in response to a range of perceived ontological insecurities (p. 67)’. Paranoia around threats to the NRM’s understanding of identity is core to its politics, but as Kisic Merino and Kinnvall (2023) elucidate, this paranoia-fantasy interrelation is a common theme in far-right politics. By extension, it may be that far-right groups are symptomatic of a broader EUropean anxiety around the EU’s own identity (Kaunert et al., 2022; Rossi, 2017: 135), and that far-right concerns around identity are simply extreme manifestations of a broader trend. The NRM engages in multiple identification practices; I suggest that to understand these we must look at the concept of the figure in structures of desire as a supplement to extant readings of fantasy in IR. The end goal of the Nordic Nation helps to deal with the aforementioned anxiety derived from challenges to identification practices and the belief in ‘forced multi-culturalism’, but it is nonetheless hard to grasp in the abstract; a collective production of a desirable future self requires multiple processes that must hold appeal in the present.

The Nordic Nation is a spatial and temporal imaginary, it is when and where the NRM will feel the security that it desires. Yet, the notion of fantasy provides these feelings of security in the present, while a spatial and temporal fantasy exists in the future; this draws into question how exactly a fantasy (Nordic Nation) may have its value felt in the present. I argue that the Nordic Nation is an intersubjective fantasy of a future space for a certain kind of body, constructed through discourse, so understanding it requires an understanding of bodies. Fantasy must necessarily concern the future, but it is needed for the present. Individual fantasies are important, but it is the mobilisation of intersubjective collective fantasies and desires that matter most herein, with its fantasy of the Nordic Nation. To understand the NRM, and the role of the body and contemporary bodies, we need to take into account the NRM’s long-term political aspirations of producing a space where certain bodies may exist, and others may not. NRM leadership makes it explicit what kind of bodies it needs for its political projects and what rights it holds over NRM members, which are physically fit and white; exercise is directly positioned as an ‘important part of the struggle’ (Elofsson, 2020; NRM Website, 2018).

This interrelation of bodies and fantasies would lead many critical IR scholars to utilise psychoanalytic (largely Lacanian) or ontological security-inspired approaches to understand NRM politics. However, I suggest that these more linguistic approaches have not fully provided a means of understanding how the ideological, material, and fantastical interact through the body in the context of extreme far-right politics and ideology. Therefore, I develop an approach which utilises Lyotard’s notions of the figure and, to a lesser extent, libidinal economy. In the following section, I set out some previous psychoanalytic approaches to IR and show how these can be aided by a sensitivity to Lyotard-ian frameworks. I argue that Lyotard’s ‘phantasy’ offers a means of understanding the affective appeal of fantasies through materiality and figures that make sense of discourse.

Psychoanalytic international relations and the potential for Lyotard

In this section, I set out some psychoanalytic approaches to IR in order to show the utility that Lyotard has for advancing this scholarship and use this for the foundation for a later theorisation of the NRM. An essential aim of this paper is integrating the concept of the figure into the discipline of IR; the figure has received little attention compared to Lyotard’s (1984) work on the libidinal economy, or his definition of postmodernism that has become a staple of lectures on poststructural IR. The concept of the figure appeared in Discourse, Figure, but this was only translated into English in 2011 so has received less attention in Anglophone IR than Lyotard’s other concepts or works. Therefore, this section sets out how Lyotard can help us understand the NRM, though pointing to some potential gaps in Lacanian scholarship. Overall, this section does not suggest that other psychoanalytic approaches should be discredited, but rather that a complementary approach, derived from Lyotard’s concepts of the figure and Libidinal Economy, can provide a framework for a novel and nuanced understanding of the NRM.

As mentioned previously, the NRM’s idea of a Nordic nation is a fantasy, in the sense that it provides relief from anxiety, and is a place where its envisioned societal ills no longer exist. This points to aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis because the Nordic Nation is a fantasy and speaks to the theft of enjoyment by the so-called ‘big other’. A core feature of Lacanian scholarship is that we cannot deal with the ‘other’ (whoever/whatever that may be) experiencing enjoyment (Zevnik, 2023: 4) and that our own (fleeting and often unsatisfactory) enjoyment (or the promise of it) helps bring us together as subjects (Mandelbaum, 2023: 6) and understand this subjectivity with language and images (Kinnvall and Svensson, 2023: 3). Similarly, Kleinian approaches draw attention to the role of the other in fantasy narratives, though relate this more directly to the notion of projection. Bad others can be used to unite all traits deemed oppositional to certain desired and future-projected selves (Chernobrov, 2014: 75). Indeed, relationality is important in Kleinian scholarship because, in times of crisis, the distinction between self and other becomes increasingly blurred and the ‘badness’ of the self can be projected away (Gellwitzki and Houde, 2023: 440). It is not just the objection to the enjoyment of the other, but the non-enjoyment of the self that becomes important. Regarding good or bad objects, ‘resemblance of strangers to either of these objects in their phantasised, rather than actual, form creates unconscious expectations of similar experience in future interactions’ (Chernobrov, 2014: 77). The intertwining of goodness and badness with selfhood and otherness are therefore important to psychoanalytic approaches to IR; we can see this in fantasies wherein the enjoyment that has been stolen by the other envisions the potential and desired future enjoyment of the self.

A fantasy, broadly conceived, is an envisioned place (oftentimes located in the future) where the enjoyment stolen by the other is felt in the self. This mitigates the effects of anxiety in the present, but the achievement of a conscious fantasy and the enjoyment that comes with it is often an impossibility; there is disagreement on this latter point, but the Nordic Nation bits best within the realms of the (likely) impossible. The NRM’s Nordic Nation is demonstrably an ideological fantasy, it is the space where anxiety is removed, and enjoyment is rife. Nation statehood is an example of fantasy and the Nordic Nation is this at a nascent level. Mandelbaum (2020) argues that ‘nation/state congruency’ (p. 3), wherein the imagined community of a nation is mapped on to the imagined territory of a state, is the most prevalent political fantasy. The NRM’s Nordic Nation is, simply, a fantastical home. Yet, it is a fantastical home for a certain identity, a certain body, and one that is necessarily exclusive of others. To use another example, Maher (2023) argues that ‘neoliberalism revolves around a central fantasy narrative, in which the “free market” functions as the crucial object of desire, constructed as uniquely able to deliver transcendental freedom, order, and material prosperity’ (p. 2). Fantasy narratives require representation in order for (necessarily incomplete) subjects to grasp the fantasy and its associated desire(s); the narrative then, gives the subject ‘social discursive representations providing them with socio-political objects of identification and with a stable yet ambiguous and fragile identity’ (Tolis, 2023: 4). Therefore, assessing the forms and functions of representations of fantasy narratives is often the focus of psychoanalytic IR.

While Lacanian and Kleinian approaches provide insights into how the NRM can be studied in IR contexts regarding fantasy and subjectivity, there are some potential gaps that the scholarship of Lyotard can be used to fill. The mirror stage, as it is used in Lacanian scholarship, points to how a subject recognises its lack of complete subjectivity by regarding itself in a mirror and subsequently undertakes practices to achieve (an impossible) wholeness. Yet, this does not necessarily allow us to understand how the social and material interact with ideas of subjectivity. Further elaboration is needed to understand how subjects come to relate to specific projections or desires for subjectivity, as part of broader material and structural social dynamics. While Lacanian scholarship does address the concept of the body through the mirror image and libidinal (as related to desire) logics (Burgess, 2023: 7; Kinnvall and Svensson, 2023: 6; Valle, 2023: 7; Zevnik and Mandelbaum, 2023), more could be done to interrogate how we come to relate to bodies in fantastical contexts through materiality. It is therefore important to understand subjectivity in broader structural frames that also speak to the material dimensions that are not always foregrounded in Lacanian scholarship. As Kapoor et al. (2023) put it, when building upon Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’, materiality ‘is always both necessary and contingent; it exists independent of us, but only becomes so at ‘the very moment of its discursive creation (p. 15)’. Therefore, the material is interwoven with the discursive, and I suggest that this is not always fully accounted for in extant psychoanalytic approaches to IR.

To return to the example of neoliberalism, as it is perhaps the most relevant given the fantastical ideology of the NRM, there is a centrality of a specific concept that underlines the whole political fantasy; homo oeconomicus, the rational economic man (Kapoor et al., 2023: 1). This character is not a subject in a Lacanian sense, he is not projected from individual self-recognition and therefore brought into society. Nor is he a fantasy, the fantasy is that of neoliberal readings of freedom. He could be a desire, though it is not always clear whether a subject can desire subjectivity. This man is the point where the discourse of fantastical neoliberalism and the materiality of embodied humanity interact; he is both aspirational and real, we think we know him because we think we know who we are, and we think we know what rationality is. This is a form of Lyotard’s (2011) figure; something that brings materiality and discourse together and allows us to understand society more broadly. These figures allow for readings of ideology and subjectivity that address matters of enjoyment and material accumulation, beyond the individual, in structural frameworks. While separate texts, reading Discourse, Figure (Lyotard, 2011), and Libidinal Economy (Lyotard, 2015) together allows us to see the desire for embodied subjectivity in the context of libidinal capitalism and the point where this discourse interacts with materiality through the figure.

Identity discourse, body

In International Relations literature, recent attention to the interrelation of bodies and fantasy has come through ontological security studies (OSS) informed approaches (see for example, Krickel-Choi, 2022; Purnell, 2021a, 2021b) and, while not the focus of this paper, it is worth noting that these derive from earlier psychonalatic work. The body is an important site for ontological security because emotions and senses are necessarily rooted in psychological experiences. This kind of OSS is opposed to a Cartesian (Descartes, 2008) mind/body dualist approach, wherein the body and mind are distinct entities; for OSS and its extensive associated concepts, the mind and body are part of the same whole. Such core features include fantasy (Browning, 2019; Eberle, 2019), routines (Steele, 2019), home (Dupuis and Thorns, 1998; Mitzen, 2018), biographical narratives (Giddens, 1993; Subotić, 2016) and (self-)identity (Browning et al., 2021; Giddens, 1993; Kinnvall, 2002; Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking, 2009). These OSS approaches are developments from the original psychoanalytic scholarship of Laing (2010 [1960]), though there have been major divergences from his foundations. Regarding the body, Laing (2010 [1960]) argues that

The dissociation of the self from the body and the close link between the body and others, lends itself to the psychotic position wherein the body is conceived not only as operating to comply with and placate others, but as being in the actual possession of others (p. 75).

For Laing (2010: 1960: 88–89), the position of the body is ambiguous, it is the separation of the body from the self that produces ontological insecurity, thus the interaction between the body and self are core concerns.

It would be unfair to argue that psychoanalytic IR, which has largely focussed on Lacan (and, to a lesser extent, Žižek and Klein), ignores the issue of the body in relation to subjectivity; however, I argue, the matter and materiality of the body has been undertheorized in relation to fantasy. So far, I have focused on the Nordic Nation as a fantasy where the enjoyment-thieving others have been removed, but I have left the selfhood position in relation to these others somewhat ambiguous. This is because the NRM’s discourse on its members’ and others’ bodies goes somewhat beyond a self/other relationship, it is also about processes of identification based on bodies. This is the interaction between the material social body and narratives about fantasy and the everyday. (Self)-identity is especially important here because it can be inducing of anxiety; the subject ‘lacks’ (Lacan, 2007) a stable identity which produces anxiety, and the subject must engage with identification practices in order to stabilise said identity. The subject becomes a site of identification practices and experiences (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 1998: 334; Epstein, 2011: 5).

Identity is not innately rooted in the body and derived from nature; rather, identities are discursively mapped onto bodies. Subjects have identities attached to their bodies, some categories of identity may be external, and some may be agentially and performatively ascribed (Butler, 2006). Even in performative approaches, bodies themselves may and will change, but it is nonetheless bodies that undertake performative practices (Butler, 2006, 2011; Masters, 2009). This interaction is complex and intersubjective, but it can be understood through the structure of libidinal economy, whereby the manufacturing of desire and linking of it to the material (in this case focussed on embodied identity) can structure behaviour (Kapoor et al., 2023; Lyotard, 2015). Material features and routinised performances have identities mapped onto them, with both being embodied phenomena. Especially important in the NRM case is that subjects can derive positive feelings from the denial of the rights of others on grounds of ‘culture, gender, sexuality, race or religion’ (Shani, 2017: 277). In that vein, identity is often deployed and mobilised by actors to further certain agenda though emotional appeal. Beyond the NRM, an example of this is the notion of ‘island identity’ being deployed by British foreign policy makers; this nostalgic temporal and geographic framing helps subjects identify with foreign policy choices (Whittaker, 2018: 954), conforming with fantasies of Britishness. One of the issues in centring identity (in IR) is that this can implicitly privilege selves (Derrida, 2016) over others; however, this is not innate and self/other dynamics are able to be included within identity when understood more broadly (Untalan, 2020: 54).

Lacanian OSS has gone someway in addressing identity in IR through psychoanalytic terms. Vieira (2018) draws attention to the role of race in identity and subject formation in postcolonial contexts, arguing that historic Brazilian elites faced ontological insecurity due to the peripheral position of Brazil in terms of a global racial hierarchy. However, Brazilian foreign policy developed in such a way that Brazil was able to move towards ontological security, through a partial rejection of such a hierarchy; this resulted in Brazil occupying an in-between position with the West and ‘third world’ (Vieira, 2018: 157). Thus, a fluidity of identity can be captured in a way that contributes to positive, or at least not negative, senses of ontological security. Bilgic and Pilcher (2023) state that ‘in a symbolic order where race, gender and class differences/dichotomies determine the vertical hierarchies and produce the postcolonial subject as inferior, autobiographical narratives are formed to address such inferior subjectivity’ (p. 11). Bilgic and Pilcher (2023) point to the interplay of identity categories in a ‘symbolic order’, alongside race they draw attention to gender and class. Kinnvall (2017) argues that the desire for ontological security is more than a result of the globalisation endemic to modernity, it is emotionally co-constituted between individuals and states. When discussing the notion of (gendered) trauma, Kinnvall (2017) argues that it is not an event, but an ongoing process that brings certain spaces into positions of ‘more or less permanent feelings of ontological insecurity’ (p. 104). There is clear attention to identity in Lacanian ontological security. However, the body is not always foregrounded; the body is an essential starting point to Lacanian thought, but its role in the communication of intersubjective fantasies and its relation to structures of desire is not always apparent.

The material body is a core concern when it comes to grounding fantastical discourses (Lyotard, 2011), as recognition and representation of the body are foundational in understanding kinds of selfhood (Butler, 2011; Lacan, 2007; Žižek, 2019) and are useful in communicating what individuals can gain from accepting a certain discourse. There are multiple discourses on bodies and their relationship to society; body positivity positions bodies as oppressed by society and offers a critique (see for example Sastre, 2014), while traditional nationalist discourse (and biopolitical readings of society) position bodies as core to both the maintenance (Mayes, 2017), and production and composition of (nation) states (Traverso, 2019). Thus, the body is an excellent point for grounding the material appeal of discourse. Therefore, I argue that NRM appeals to materiality to ground its discourse through linking its fantastical ideology to the production and protection of idealised bodies. The body is an extant entity and any discourse on its purpose or how it should look concerns the condition of possibility around the body’s capacity to change into a (non)ideal form. The construction of the (non)ideal form is discursive, but a discourse that necessarily relates to the future; any reading of bodies and their purpose is fantastical in orientation because it is a way of mitigating against anxiety in the future by creating a teleology of the body. Fantasies are felt and experienced in the present, but their concerns are always things which are not present, things imagined to be (possible) in the future, however ambiguous these things or futures may be.

The fantasy of the Nordic Nation and its figural inhabitants are the focus of this paper; this is a fantasy of a home, with envisioned residents of such a home. The notion of home, especially when taken to be a delimited space in which routines can be performed (Dupuis and Thorns, 1998; Kinnvall, 2002; Mitzen, 2018), is a place for certain bodies. When identity is mapped onto bodies through perceived material signifiers, performance, or social construction, then bodies (whether ‘real’ of fantastical) become the means of determining who may or may not enter a space. It is not inherent to fantasy or home, but embodied exclusion is core to the NRM’s political fantasies. Even notions of home premised upon hospitality (Price, 2024; Squire, 2020) still require certain things be done, and routines to be performed, by those entering the home. Furthermore, embodied routines can be operationalised around the achievement of fantasy, as is the case for the NRM. Fantasy itself necessarily relates to the body and directly relates to where and when the body belongs. A fantasy will relate to some form of ideal(ised) body; this may be the body of a complete subject, or a body which renders a fantastical discourse intelligible. Fantasies must be made intelligible and speak to present subjects, so its discourse must find a grounding in materiality; Therefore, I argue that the concept of the figure allows for grounding discourse in materiality and that the most powerful kind of figure is a body to which we can relate.

Discourse, fantasy

This section addresses competing but complementary readings of fantasy, as related to the desire for unattainable objects, such as subjectivity, stable identity, and home. In Lacanian terms, these are labelled the objet petit a (Lacan, 2007); fantasy surrounds these objects and is inseparable from those who hold the fantasy. The objet petit a is that which is not present but is desired to be (Arfi, 2010: 432). Fantasy is where we can see unobtainable objects and is a necessity for understanding such objects (Ormrod, 2014). Following Melanie Klein, Gellwitzki and Houde (2023: 440) argue that obstacles to fulfilling a fantasy directly contribute to mitigating anxiety, rather than perpetuating the appeal of the fantastical myth because this allows subjects to project their own badness onto a kind of canvas away from themselves. From these perspectives, desires can only be understood through reference to fantasy. Subjects are made anxious by the absence of a desired object, but the fantasy of attaining it can mitigate this.

Akhtar (1996: 723) argues that fantasies necessarily make reference to notions of ‘someday’ (in the future) and ‘if only’ (an idealisation of the past); these inform one another, as past experience influences understandings of the future. A positive view of the past and a desire for its return is nostalgia (Bennett, 2018). A fantasy points towards an idea of the future, but it can take objects from the past to inform and structure this future. Therefore, nostalgia is a critique of the present and future (Browning, 2019). Edkins and Pin-Fat (1998) question the presence of subjectivity at any one instance, arguing that ‘the subject only ever will have been’ (p. 1), because it is itself a fantasy which is reliant on imaginaries of the past. The casting of the subject forward into the future, is achieved through fantasy; a nostalgic past subjectivity thus informs the image of a desired future based on a (perceived) knowable past.

Cash and Kinnvall (2017) argue that ‘the national fantasy of homogeneity tends to involve diffuse attempts at governing securities, identities and histories’ (p. 268). These core concepts of security, identity, and history are highly complex with their own constituent elements and are hard to pin down; fantasies are further complicated by the necessity of referencing other concepts, each making reference to different objects and desires. In Lacan-influenced scholarship, fantasy shows us what we desire and how we come to desire it (Eberle, 2019; Lacan, 2007; Žižek, 2019). However, for Lyotard, desire holds a somewhat different meaning; rather than something staged through phantasy, desire is taken to be productive itself (Mowitt, 2011). This is where Lyotard can supplement Lacanian readings of fantasy; Lyotard (2011: 250) argues that Lacan struggled to conceptualise the subject beyond discourse and metaphor. The mirror image can therefore be read as insufficient in understanding the materiality of embodied subjectivity. For Lyotard, the subject and its associated discourses require some kind of material grounding. Lyotard (2011: 249) draws on the notion of the figure to make these arguments, and a core characteristic of the figure is that it dwells as a ‘phantasm’ within discourse.

Discourse necessarily relates to the material (Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams, 2015). Fantasy is a kind of discourse and a powerful one, which speaks to both the desire for wholeness and desire to be rid of existential anxiety (Solomon, 2013, 2015). Irrespective of one’s reading of fantasy, it may show us what and how we desire (Žižek, 2019) or it may be an unconscious defence mechanism against anxiety that influences subject understandings and allows them to experience reality by which they can relate to others (Gellwitzki and Houde, 2023; Gellwitzki and Price, 2024; Klein, 1997), phantasy is discursive and material. For Lyotard and Lydon (1983)

phantasy . . . is a ghost, a lost soul that discourse is called upon to redeem, because it is a meaning (sens) that is waiting to be signified (signifié), and that presents itself as a representation because it cannot find expression in word. (p. 350)

In simpler terms, discourse is necessary to bring phantasy into a comprehsible state, and it does this through (unconscious) representations of said phantasy.

A fantasy allows for the continuation of everyday life while facing anxiety (Browning, 2019); thus, a fantasy provides an insight into how a discourse may be accepted. For example, the NRM’s fantasy of the Nordic Nation is given as a future physical home wherein identity is stable and ways of life are secure. By showing what the future subjectivity will look like, the fantasy provides the conditions for its achievement. When the envisioned future body is created, which can be done through present-day routines, the fantasy of an exclusive national home will be achieved. More broadly than the NRM, subjects may hold different desires, and this may vary depending on pre-existing societal discourses, but discursively tapping into deep-seated desires allows for certain fantastical discourses to take hold. Thus, it is important to look at how fantastical discourses become embedded in the body. Therefore, I turn to Lyotard’s (2011) notion of the figure, as an entity that straddles discourse, fantasy, and materiality. I argue that the figure can provide a framework that shows us how we come to understand fantasies and position them in relation to ourselves and our present actions. This is not to say that other approaches do not show the appeals of fantasy in certain settings, but to suggest that the inclusion of the concept of the figure can help develop these and does not need to contradict other approaches.

The figure in fantasy

The figure is described by Lyotard (2011) as ‘the symbol’s transcendence [. . .] that is, a spatial manifestation that linguistic space cannot incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification’ (p. 7). The figure is both tied to, yet beyond, language; it is through this that discourses can be understood. In essence, meaning is more than linguistic as there is a spatial and material dimension to it (Rodowick, 2001). The figure renders discourse intelligible through grounding it in materiality, and is itself understood through discourse (Lyotard, 2011). A figure makes sense of a broader phantasy; there can be a phantasy of a figure (an unconscious image of discourse attached to materiality), but this can be used to make sense of a broader phantasy. Lyotard (2011: 338) frames the figure in terms of Freud’s drives; certain drives can only be understood through the figures associated with them. The mother or father figures are examples of figures that correspond with libidinal and corporeal desires and phantasies, ones that fit within the broader structural dynamics of capitalism, when capitalism is read as fundamentally intertwined with the notion of desire (Kapoor et al., 2023; Lyotard, 2015). To say capitalism is intertwined with desire is to suggest that drives for material objects are not only economic but psychological; thus, the manufacturing of psychological desire for objects is crucial to capitalism. Lyotard’s notion of libidinal economy is therefore useful in understanding how desire is manufactured and structured in relation to phantasies and how these are realised in material terms; importantly, this allows phantasy and desire to be manufactured on a collective level, beyond the individual alone. Therefore, Lyotard can help in looking at psychoanalytic group dynamics. When it takes the form of a body, the figure is relatable; bodies provide excellent starting points onto which discourse can be mapped. Lyotard is not explicit in saying figures must be bodies; however, the focus on Freudian figures of mothers and fathers provides precedent for interpreting them as such.

Signifiers, whereby the ‘thing or body [is] designated as such’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009: 204), are needed to produce figures; in other words, the observable form that meaning takes (signifier) requires some sort of social production. As argued above, fantasy is always waiting to be signified, so efforts must be made to render it intelligible, and the figure is key in doing so. Even if much signification goes on, discourse still speaks to an object in a material sense (Lyotard, 2011); this does not mean that there are reducible characteristics to an object (Derrida, 2016), rather that discourse needs attachment to something understood as material. Identities work through signification and comparison to others, as distinct from selves; signifiers relate to identities that cover the lack at the heart of anxiety (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 1998: 7) but their relation to the signified is fragile and requires regular (re)assertion. Thus, in establishing their ideal society and its inhabitants, it is not enough for the NRM to simply say what it will look like but relate this to others and to selves in a material sense. The fantasy of the Nordic Nation only makes sense when it is understood through materiality, and the material of the Nordic Nation and its inhabitants is fundamentally and necessarily different to the world as it is now. This difference can only truly be grasped when we look to how material signifiers are produced and interpreted from an embodied perspective, this is the place of the figural body.

The figural body (Rodowick, 2001) is an object of desire that brings discourse and materiality together, which allows the subject to understand its constructed self in relation to others and their identities, as well as giving the self an image of its ideal form. Even though it has a mutually constituting relationship with discourse, the figure provides a framework for understanding embodied identity. When the body becomes the signifier of identity and lifestyle, as is the case with the NRM, the governance of these concepts must start from the body. Ideal forms of such concepts can be encapsulated in a figural body, the discursively produced but materially grounded (Lyotard, 2011) ‘ideal’ form of human life. The figural body allows for other bodies to be understood in relation to it (Rodowick, 2001). Being told what the ideal form of life is and that one is capable of achieving it, while others are not, helps foster community with others in the same position and status over those who are not. Even though this stable identity cannot be reached, due to the presence of the lack (Lacan, 1978; Žižek, 2019), this impossibility is covered by the figure as a phantasy that helps subjects see the phantasy in the material world (Lyotard, 2011; Rodowick, 2001). This functions the same whether fantasy is unconscious or conscious, it is hazy, aethereal, and omnipresent; the figure is what allows aspects of fantasy and discourse to be condensed into intelligible and relatable representations and how we can see ourselves and our valued concepts in the fantasy.

One way of addressing this could be through a Lacanian understanding of fantasy, wherein the unconscious symbolic order occupies a central position. The symbolic functions through language, orders, and norms, which can be accepted intersubjectively; thus, a fantasy can be understood intersubjectively through relation with others, facilitated by a subject’s position within the symbolic order (Lacan, 2007). However, Lyotard (2011: 250, 253) argues that Lacan’s understanding of subjectivity is flawed on the grounds that the subject is assumed to exist in discourse metaphorically, not materially. In contrast, Lyotard (2011) links the subject and unconscious, and its place within phantasy and discourse to a non-metaphorical material figural body, claiming:

this property of unconscious space (a property it shares with the libidinal body) – its capacity to contain several places in one place, to form a block out of what cannot possibly coexist – is the secret of the figural, which transgresses the intervals that constitute discourse and the distances that constitute representation. (p. 339)

Thus, the unconscious, phantasy, and subjectivity are drawn together through the notion of the figural and, in this case, the figural (libidinal) body. Therefore, fantasies/phantasies are necessarily embodied. Rather than a mirror providing visual wholeness for the subject, the figure can speak to a materiality of the body. Importantly, it is not necessarily one’s own body, but one that is produced as part of broader structures of desire. There is a projection of wholeness, but it goes beyond the individual. We relate to bodies of others, and we relate to bodies through our own; to participate in a phantasy is to see a certain kind of body, there is an aspiration to a wholeness of another person, but that person is who we want to be. There is a baseline of materiality that needs to be acknowledged, and this can be grounded in discourse which can go beyond the visuality of reflection. The figure thus offers a means of addressing images, imaginaries, and discourse together, while coherently grappling with materiality, and positioning this in relation to broader societal structures that relate to the (un)conscious production of desire. Thus, the figure allows for a clear identification with phantasy, making the latter grounded, and relational. The body stands in the present and, while the objectives of fantasy are in the future, the phantasy is nonetheless felt in the present. Through the figure, the subject is able to anticipate how the future would feel because the material body is related to phantasy through the figural body and bring that feeling to the present.

Between ontological security and psychoanalytic IR more generally, much has been done to deepen our understandings of the embodied psychological drivers of (international) politics. Both utilise the notion of fantasy to understand the relationship between desire, subjectivity (and its associated processes of identification), and behaviour; however, I contend that further interrogation of fantasies themselves is needed. Furthermore, it is important to establish a distinction between a fantasised whole subject and embodied concepts that make sense of fantasies. A Lacanian reading of subjectivity can see a future projection of wholeness of the self and, when read with ontological security scholarship, helps us understand the behaviour of individuals and states. However, the fantasised future wholeness of the individual and means by which individuals understand fantastical discourses are not necessarily synonymous. It is possible for one figure to make sense of a fantastical discourse and another to do so through embodied relationality. The homo oeconomicus makes sense of capitalist discourse and the individual can relate to it; however, it is too abstract to function as a projection of wholeness. The figure of the successful businessperson can be readily seen in popular culture, and therefore related to, so we can see how us embodied subjects would feel if we were to achieve wholeness as a capitalist subject. Thus, there is more than just a fantasy of wholeness when we talk of the body; there is a figure that makes sense of our discourses on wholeness and a figure that makes sense of our structural societal discourses within a libidinal economy. At times, these figures may be the same; for example, the Nazis and the Aryan Man, but it is important to distinguish the functions of the figure from those of the Lacanian subject. Indeed, the figure of the Norseman fulfils both roles, but it is important to stress that this is not only a fantasy of complete subjectivity, but a way of making sense of this fantasy and relating embodied experience to such a fantasy.

Discourse, figure, and the Norseman

Mobilisation and alteration of the bodies of ‘resistance men’ is part of NRM ideological discourse and the empirical and analytical focus of this section. I suggest that the discursive and material production and representation of the ‘resistance man’ is the aforementioned figure of the Norseman, an expression which herein refers to the future body of the ‘resistance man’ that will be at home in the fantasied-over Nordic Nation and renders said polity intelligible. The figure of the Norseman ³ is more than just an image of a Viking, this is the embodiment of the NRM’s politics. He is more than just a representative of NRM politics: he encapsulates, and is, its politics. The crux of the NRM’s ideology is that its people’s identity and its way of knowing about identity are fundamentally threatened. The NRM needs an appealing fantasy to make its ideological discourse take hold; this must appeal to the body because perceptible embodied identities are central to the NRM’s politics, with its fantastical discourses requiring continual reassertion (Eberle, 2019; Mandelbaum, 2020; Ormrod, 2014). A reassertion of an appealing fantasy requires the presentation of a perpetually relatable entity which allows subjects to identify with said fantasy and its constituent features. Lyotard (2015) argues that desire and enjoyment flow from one point to another through a structure (labelled as the libidinal economy); with desire and enjoyment (as well as their intensities) being so mobile that pinning down these concepts becomes difficult. Making certain ideas materially appealing is necessary if they are to be valued within a libidinal economy. It is this that leaves us with the figure, as the premier means of understanding NRM discourse.

The Nordic Nation is a fantasy characterised by the absence of the NRM’s societal ills, yet it is not apparent how one would feel when imagined as living in this fantasy. Objects of fantasy are unattainable (Eberle, 2019; Lacan, 1978; Ormrod, 2014; Žižek, 2019), they exist in the unconscious and/or in the future, but an idea of how fantasy’s attainment would feel is necessary because this gives fantasy appeal in the present. The NRM’s fantastical discourses, manifested in the figure of the Norseman, allow for so-called ‘resistance men’ (Almroth, 2022) to imagine how it would feel to be at home in the material realisation of the Nordic Nation. The figure of the Norseman is the cumulative politics of the NRM attached to a material body; he is white, heterosexual, a ‘real man’ (NRM Website, 2022), a father at one with nature (Lindberg, 2021), part of a non-globalised economy without foreign ‘Zionist’ influence (NRM Website, 2020a), and fit and healthy (NRM Website, 2019b). To know the body in the exclusive home of the Nordic Nation, is to know what it will feel like to be there in an embodied sense.

Imagine buying a ‘dream house’, this fantasy only holds when one can imagine the embodied material reality of living in said house, and we can see how our behaviours may be structured by the desire to live in such a place. The belief that one may someday own their dream home allows one to acquiesce and desire to be part of the economy that will allegedly provide such a home, and thus provide a relief from anxiety, premised on future embodied inhabitation. This is the case with the Nordic Nation and the figure of the Norseman, a vision of the fantastical future can have its affects felt in the present through identifying with the figure of the Norseman. The figure of the Norseman allows the desire for bodies to be understood in ideological and fantastical terms. Without a figural body, the perceptible embodied signifiers of identity, which the NRM needs to communicate its ideological fantasy of the Nordic Nation, the NRM’s fantasies cannot hold. The figure of the Norseman is an ever-present phantasm in NRM discourse, and it must be so; without the figure making sense of its discourse, then the NRM has no way of communicating the material validity of its central ideological fantasy. Without the figure of the Norseman, the NRM cannot organise people around a common desire for a material object.

Understanding discourse through the figural body allows us to understand the NRM’s ideology and to grasp the appeal of the fantasy of the Nordic Nation. To provide an example, Magnusson (2021), an NRM ideologue, wrote on the ‘misappropriation’ of Nordic rituals, in which he focusses on the bodies and perceived inauthentic practices of Norse culture. He takes umbrage with people of colour engaging in Neo-Pagan Norse practices and the implication is that this is inauthentic in comparison to ‘genuine Norse beliefs’. From this oppositional framing, we can infer that the NRM sees its beliefs and practices as genuinely ‘Norse’. The idea of a genuine past which others do not respect but the NRM upholds is a nostalgia that sees the past in exclusively positive terms and casts this into the future (Akhtar, 1996; Elgenius and Rydgren, 2019). The Nordic Nation is a space for these exclusivist ‘genuine beliefs’ (Magnusson, 2021), but the ideas of it are drawn from the past. The premodern Nordic region is imagined as a place of ‘genuine’ Norse lifestyles wherein society had not yet been damaged by modernity and its ills. The Nordic Nation is a fantasy of future home, but it is specifically the constructed Norseman’s home; only in understanding the figure can we fully see the material appeal of a home and fantasy.

Yet, the past is less knowable than the present. From the past, we have records of specific embodied figures; there are already imaginaries of bodies through which discourse can be made intelligible. It is thus that the figure is not exclusively a projection of a whole subject, but a means of understanding how different discourses and fantasies are tied together through visions of bodies, when related to material spaces and individuals. One can understand one’s family history through linking discourse to figural bodies of the past; being able to relate one’s body to another is core to grounding discourse in materiality (Rodowick, 2001). Vicarious identification, wherein one identifies with another, to feel a sense of individual fulfilment which is otherwise lacking (Browning et al., 2021), occurs in relation to past figures, such as family members or historical figures taken to be of importance (Haigh, 2024). Especially when associated with a specific action (e.g. military service), vicarious identification with a past figure necessitates an identification with a material body; this is a clear case where material planes are brought into relation with discourse through grounding in a figural body. By referencing Vikings, the NRM is doing a kind of family history, or a biographical narrative (Subotić, 2016), which speaks to a fantasy of future fulfilment.

The Norseman, drawn from the past, informs and becomes the fantasy of the future. The past and future figural Norseman allows resistance men to relate to a body in a fantasy. The past is knowable, and it is materially grounded through a figure (Lyotard, 2011; Rodowick, 2001), there is a materiality to past bodies to which resistance men can relate; it is this that allows the figure to be cast forward into the future. This casting forward makes the discursive ideological fantasy of the Nordic Nation intelligible; the resistance men know the feeling of the fantasy’s achievement because they know how it felt in the past, but they can only do this by seeing the figural body that feels both. Therefore, resistance men are able to reap the rewards of their discursive fantasy by grounding it in materiality, through the figure; the knowability of fantastical future therefore allows one to feel a relief of anxiety in the present.

Conclusion: figural bodies in discursive fantasies

In this paper, I offered a reading of the Nordic Resistance Movement that shows the interrelation of bodies and ideological fantasies. Moreover, I have argued that collective fantasies need bodies to hold and communicate their appeal. The Nordic Nation is constructed as a desirable home for the Nordic people, and the NRM organises its ideology and activism around producing such a home. But this nation is an abstract concept and an appeal to embodied materiality is needed to communicate the value of this fantasy. A material body can form an object of desire in an economy orientated around the interplay between desire and materiality; this renders certain kinds of bodies necessary for grounding the appeal of collective fantasies. This kind of body is Lyotard’s (embodied) ‘figure’, the point in which the discursive and material meet, and offers a means of subjects relating themselves to expansive fantasies.

Furthermore, I have offered a supplement to existing psychoanalytic IR scholarship. This was done by showing that the interplay between the material, the ideological, and the fantastical in far-right thought is best understood when read through the notion of the figure in the context of the libidinal economy. The figure matters because it allows us to see how fantastical discourses can appeal to bodies, and the libidinal economy allows us to see how these can be collective, by positioning them within broader structures of desire. Bringing these concepts together allowed for a study of the NRM because the coalescence of fantasy, identity, and the body are central to the NRM that contributes to the literature by putting them into psychoanalytical frames that account for structural dynamics relating to the production of desire.

To conclude, introducing Lyotard’s concept of the figure does not aim to discredit, but rather to supplement, previous psychoanalytic work. Lyotard’s scholarship on figures, phantasies, and libidinal economy can be placed in dialogue with other approaches. The interplay between the Lacanian subject and the Lyotardian figure may be something to explore in future research. For now, it is the figure of the Norseman that has shown the centrality of the body in fantasy, even when fantasies do not directly speak to individuals or bodies, the fantasy is always a promise of a space a body can occupy and feel. Fantasy can tie together the past, present, and future, and with the figure we can understand how this feels in an embodied sense.