Introduction
The 2022 general elections in Sweden saw the right-wing bloc triumph over their left-wing rivals, winning by a razor-thin margin. This victory was met by supporters with intense emotions and attitudes such as elation, self-righteousness, gloating, and schadenfreude. The triumph’s dramatic context and historical significance stemmed from ousting a centre-left order perceived as betraying Sweden’s aspirations, trust, security, and exceptionality. The far-right Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) played a crucial role in this success. Formerly a neo-Nazi party, SD has sought to whitewash its image, positioning itself closer to the political ‘centre’ by disavowing radical beliefs and adopting modern, aesthetically pleasing, and ‘agreeable’ rhetoric and discourses.
One instance of celebration-in-victory was caught in an impromptu TV interview that went viral:Footnote 1 Rebecka Fallenkvist, a former television presenter and SD politician, expressed her elation over the triumph by uttering ‘Helg Seger!’.Footnote 2 While this term literally means ‘weekend victory!’ in Swedish, it is a dog whistle associated with ‘Hell Seger’, the Swedish far right’s translation of the Nazi motto ‘Sieg Heil’ (‘hail victory’). Fallenkvist’s neo-Nazi allegory, on the eve of a ‘concerted’ right-wing victory, highlights the affective dimension of the phenomenon of far-right normalisation. This can be seen in two interdependent dynamics. First is the tension between SD’s radically exclusionary beliefs and their attempts to appeal to the political mainstream.Footnote 3 Second, Fallenkvist’s elation was mirrored by enjoyment-filled expressions from SD’s right-wing allies – Liberals, Moderates, and Christian Democrats – who had previously disavowed SD for its far-right discourses and neo-Nazi past.Footnote 4 Sweden’s historical championing of liberal values domestically and internationally serves as a perplexing analytical springboard for understanding the normalisation of the far right, particularly in the context of enjoyment.
By analysing enjoyment in the moment of ‘victory’, I problematise the global phenomenon of far-right normalisation and reveal the role of centre-right and right-wing subjects (hereafter: ‘mainstream right wing’) and discourses in its success. These intense expressions can be understood under Derek Hook’sFootnote 5 Lacanian approach to the analysis of enjoyment (or jouissance) as a political factor. Jouissance Footnote 6 is ‘an enjoyment intermingled with suffering; it is a type of painful arousal poised on the verge of the traumatic’.Footnote 7 It reveals the repressed or sublimated elements within mainstream right-wing politics and their role in the (in)securitisation of subjects. This process becomes apparent when contradictions to centre-right symbolic commitments arise, manifesting as intense, transgressive emotions. Jouissance is not reduced to any single emotion but rather is a complex mode of intensity partially ‘photographed’ in their interplay and aimed at the ‘threatening’ Other. This ‘Other’ does not refer solely to ‘other persons’ but also represents the ‘big Other’, the manifestation of symbolic authority that demands our compliance – experienced in, e.g., discourses of national identity or in the figure of the state.Footnote 8
Lacanian scholars focus on the role of emotions in politics, emphasising that the analysis of jouissance is crucial for understanding how ideological interpellation acts as a bulwark against the threatening ‘Other’, providing a sociocultural bond that maintains social cohesion.Footnote 9 This bulwark is composed of illusory yet compelling and stabilising fantasies of self-continuity that organise the experience of jouissance – i.e. fantasies of ontological security. By examining emotionally charged contradictions, enjoyment reveals how the subject’s engagement with reactionary fantasies is co-constituted with the anxiety-inducing process of reforming its identity against the Other. Enjoyment is captured in brief moments or ‘festivals of excess’, like the right-wing victory celebrations, and its analysis provides a unique glimpse into the interplay between the global ‘retreat’ of the liberal democratic order and the normalisation of the far right.
Considering the vital role of jouissance in far-right normalisation, this article poses the research questions: What can the experience and manifestations of enjoyment (jouissance) reveal about the reconfiguration of right-wing politics? and how does this jouissance-infused process contribute to normalising the far right in liberal societies? These questions are explored through the lens of ontological security, a fantasy that partially stabilises subjective coherence and manifests in civilisational discourses.
This article is structured as follows. In the first part, I provide an overview of how the literature on emotions and ontological security studies (OSS) relates to the concept of enjoyment and propose my contributions to the field of OSS. Second, I examine the overarching concepts of ‘far right’ and ‘normalisation’ to guide the theoretical discussions. Third, I explore the relationship between ontological security and jouissance, which composes the analytical framework. Fourth, I examine Sweden’s political context and key actors through this framework, bridging the theoretical discussions with the empirical exploration of jouissance.
I follow these parts by operationalising the ‘analytics of enjoyment’ in three modes of jouissance. First, I analyse the fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism as the symbolic site structuring and producing the experience of enjoyment and its imperilment. Second, based on this ‘structuring fantasy’, I explore the threatening modes of enjoyment of cultural and racial (i.e. ethnocultural) Others. Subsequently, I examine the ‘imperilled’ modes of enjoyment of the ‘righteous’ Swedes. The latter two modes of jouissance are illustrated through tweets by prominent Swedish political figures. I conclude by reflecting on the relationship between jouissance, ontological security, and far-right normalisation.
Emotions in far-right politics
While the relationship between jouissance, far-right politics, and ontological security studies (OSS) is prominent, the normalisation of the far right has been explored within the broader field of the politics of emotion,Footnote 10 within which OSS is epistemologically embedded.Footnote 11
For instance, WodakFootnote 12 focuses on how the far right’s mobilisation of moral emotions like nostalgia, anger, resentment, and shame is instrumental in its normalisation insofar as they allow us to ‘make sense’ of a crisis-saturated context.Footnote 13 These emotions are categorised as either ‘other-condemning’ (e.g. anger) or ‘self-conscious’ (e.g. shame, guilt), which together shape our identities and belonging against the ‘malign’ Other. The far-right targeting of the Other through negative ‘sticky associations’ like ‘refugee’ as ‘invader’Footnote 14 is also covered by the literature on nostalgia. For Homolar and Scholz,Footnote 15 nostalgia plays a more complex role than resentment or anger since it operates simultaneously as joyful (linked to a blissful past) and painful (linked to the loss of joy). Nostalgia is a key emotional mechanism in the normalisation of the far right, involving ‘picking and freezing’ convenient moments of lost ‘bliss’ and repackaging them as identity-forming fantasies of unity and fulfilment.Footnote 16
The role of joy in the operation and ‘mainstreaming’ of the far right is also examined by Zulianello,Footnote 17 who argues that celebrations and camaraderie in ‘inner circles’ are experienced as righteous rewards for emotionally investing in ‘the cause’, i.e. performing ‘diligently’ in mainstream milieus despite societal repercussions. Furthermore, LugerFootnote 18 explores spaces, lifestyles, and moments of political celebration concerning MAGA politics in the USA, arguing that apparently benign collective celebratory patriotism can turn into milieus of radical exclusion and supremacy contributing to the ‘the fascist creep’. Celebration-turned-exclusion can be attested in the reactionary affect behind the Swedish right-wing bloc’s ‘patriotic’ celebrations, which oscillated from and entangled the Liberal party’s rapturous welcoming of the resultsFootnote 19 to the elation surrounding Fallenkvist’s ‘Helg Seger!’ incident.
The mainstreaming of the far right has also been examined through the concept of ressentiment. For Capelos and Demertzis, ressentiment is a complex affective transvaluation that perpetuates the victimhood of the aggrieved subject, where feelings of impotence towards an unattainable object-of-desire turn into moral superiority over the now-unwanted and unworthy object.Footnote 20 Ressentiment has a ‘bitter affective core’, prominently manifesting ‘among the passive, the humiliated and the weak of society’ who experience intense powerlessness and victimhood.Footnote 21 Ressentiment is considered the ‘affective undercurrent of grievance politics’,Footnote 22 which emerges in the blending of negative emotions like shame and powerlessness that result from the perceived degradation of social and intergenerational status.
While ressentiment and other theories on emotions provide insights into far-right dynamics, Lacanian concepts like jouissance and the object-cause of desire uniquely explain how ideologies shape identities through enjoyment-producing fantasies of ontological (in)security. For instance, ressentiment is primarily a ‘bitter’ affective register, while jouissance (re)frames it as inextricable from the interplay between elation, joy, and celebration. While jouissance shares the emphasis on the affective register of reactionary politics, it is not bound to it – it can also be found in emancipatory or progressive iterations. Furthermore, ressentiment is framed as a state that the subject ‘falls in’ or ‘resists’,Footnote 23 situating it as crucial yet extrinsic to the subject. In contrast, jouissance is an inseparable component of our subjectivity – i.e. while ressentiment can happen to the subject, jouissance and the anxiety it is driven by represents the moment of subjectivity itself.Footnote 24 Considering the contributions and limitations of the politics of emotion literature on far-right normalisation and enjoyment, I discuss how ontological security literature addresses this relationship.
Enjoyment in ontological security studies
Ontological security constitutes a fundamental yet ultimately illusory stabilising fantasy which structures the experience of enjoyment. Robert LaingFootnote 25 and Anthony Giddens,Footnote 26 followed by first-generation OSS scholars like Mitzen,Footnote 27 Steele,Footnote 28 and Kinnvall,Footnote 29 conceptualise ontological security as a psychic state corresponding to the ‘security of being’ of the modern subject. It entails the need of a subject who is ‘centred … cognitively and emotionally invested’Footnote 30 to experience a stable, continuous world and identity via rituals and practices. The Lacanian turn in OSS problematises Giddens’s primacy of agency and failure to incorporate the role of the unconscious.Footnote 31 Instead of understanding ontological security as a security of being, the Lacanian approach recasts this fantasy as a security of becoming.Footnote 32 Here, the desiring subject is seen as perpetually caught in an insatiable quest to attain a stable identity and to recapture lost wholeness. Ontological security generates elements of insecurity that threaten the subject’s prospects of stability and fulfilment of its desires. Obstacles to attainment, embodied in threatening Others, are paradoxically experienced as jouissance since they drive the subject towards its satisfaction.Footnote 33 This ontological-securitising dynamic was evident in Moderate MP Jan Ericson’s commendation of the securitising alliance between the Swedish far right and centre right as one of efficiency, trust, and togetherness, in stark contrast to a ‘left’ that is to be reviled.Footnote 34
The role of enjoyment as a political factor has been highlighted and explored by Lacanian OSS scholars. For instance, post-colonial OSS has explored the roles of fantasy and enjoyment in the co-constituted formation of the identities of post-colonial and imperial subjects. For Vieira, post-colonial ontological security refers to the articulation of ‘anxiety-driven affective traces’Footnote 35 to these societies’ colonial pasts. These traces mark the ambivalent nature of the post-colonial subject, who is stuck ‘unstably in-between the West and the non-West’.Footnote 36 The promise of ‘fullness’ or ontological security is constituted by (and conditions) the enjoyment of belonging, which drives the post-colonial subject to identify and even mimic the ‘modern’ Western colonial structure that signifies their lack.
KinnvallFootnote 37 examines the emotional appeal of populist discourses in post-colonial imaginaries, focusing on the object of the imaginary other (e.g. refugees, immigrants). She discusses the process of nation-building concerning the melancholia of Empire, in which the ‘primordial’ jouissance that constituted it has been lost. The impossibility of satisfying melancholic enjoyment marks its experience, signifying a ‘thief’ of enjoyment that prevents fulfilment. Bilgic and PilcherFootnote 38 examine the post-colonial subject in terms of anxious ‘status-seeking’ – quests for a ‘whole’ identity within social hierarchies. In this pursuit, enjoyment is generated by narratives of temporary ‘illusory fullness’. Status is seen as an ‘anchor for wholeness’,Footnote 39 a remedy to the anxiety of the post-colonial subject. The prospect of subjective ‘completeness’ generates temporary yet ultimately illusory enjoyment, which produces the anxiety that drives the subject towards the ‘anchoring’ status-seeking in ‘racialised, gendered, and classed hierarchies’.Footnote 40
Lacanian ontological security also addresses jouissance in the context of nation-building, nostalgia, and power. Vulović and EjdusFootnote 41 explore the role of the ‘object-cause of desire’ in ontological security and its relationship with enjoyment, illustrated by Serbia’s opposition to Kosovo joining UNESCO. Serbia’s ‘lost’ object-cause of desire, Kosovo, both ‘pulls’ and causes its desire, which is crucial for recapturing lost enjoyment and creating a ‘national’ coherent self.Footnote 42 Nostalgic fantasies about the object-cause of desire entail narratives of loss and potential recapture, and jouissance is the currency through which these narratives are experienced.Footnote 43 Similarly, EberleFootnote 44 argues that jouissance and its potential theft are fundamental for constituting ontologically secure national subjectivities. However, merely depicting ‘the thief’ as a threat lacks affective efficiency. Rather, the interplay between desire and jouissance is crucial for analysing fantasies, since the theft of enjoyment is signified not only in material loss but as a threat to our identity. In Sweden, mainstream and far-right leaders have co-capitalised on this identity-dislocating ‘threat’. The Sweden Democrats’ leader, Jimmie Åkesson, associates the material ‘burden’ of immigrationFootnote 45 with imaginaries of civilisational collapse,Footnote 46 which has been replicated by Moderate MP Jan Ericson in condemning the ‘predictable’ threat of Islamic parties to Swedish politics.Footnote 47
In addressing Brexit, BrowningFootnote 48 highlights the investment in hopes of fulfilment and the populist fantasies feeding such hopes. Brexit’s reactionary promise of fulfilment is ‘emotionally seductive and politically mobilising’,Footnote 49 a key strategy of ontological (in)security manipulation. Fantasies are compelling as they ‘harness signifiers [of ontological security that subjects] enjoy identifying with’.Footnote 50 In populist politics, fantasies are ‘seductive’ only if they can mobilise the jouissance embedded in signifiers of self-identity like ‘control’, ‘Empire’, and ‘pride’. This enjoyment is also experienced transgressively through othering – positioning immigrants, ‘elites’, or the European Union (EU) as enjoying at the expense of ‘the people’.
Outlining jouissance at the forefront of ontological security studies
While contemporary ontological security literature is invaluable for elucidating the role of jouissance in normalising the far right, this article bridges several theoretical, methodological, and empirical shortcomings. First, while the normalisation of the far right has been widely studied, its relation with enjoyment remains underexplored, particularly from an OSS perspective. Literature on the far right has tangentially addressed this link, either by exploring the relationship between far-right politics and enjoymentFootnote 51 or by connecting far-right discourses and ontological security.Footnote 52 Second, OSS studies on jouissance focus mainly on grievance, anger, and fear, leaving the celebratory ‘moment of victory’ empirically underexplored, particularly in the context of far-right normalisation. Finally, Lacanian OSS literature has examined the nation as a subject constructed through fantasies of political belonging, e.g. post-colonial and post-imperial. Alternative formulations of national subjectivity, such as Sweden’s quest for exceptionalism, despite being neither post-imperial nor post-colonial, remain marginal. Sweden’s case can provide insights into how enjoyment shapes the affective experience of a liberal, ‘generous’, ‘peace-seeking’ nation.
This article foregrounds jouissance theoretically and methodologically. It systematically examines the role and modes of enjoyment in producing subjectivities, complementing HookFootnote 53 by framing these in the context of far-right normalisation via the lens of ontological security. I analyse three coordinates of ‘modes of jouissance’ and their interplay: fantasies organising enjoyment (e.g. Swedish exceptionalism), the threatening enjoyment of ethnocultural and politically antagonistic Others, and the imperilled enjoyment of the ‘real Swedes’. The analysis is empirically grounded in ‘moments of victory’, emphasising celebratory, self-righteous, and exultant dimensions over fear, anger, and grievance, framing ontological security as a jouissance-structuring libidinal fantasy. To complement the state- and nation-centric OSS literature, I analyse the discourses of Swedish mainstream right-wing subjects, focusing on how they negotiate their roles amidst far-right normalisation. This analysis is situated within the global backlash against liberalism, illustrated through the fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism.
Conceptualising the far right and its normalisation
While the far right is a difficult-to-define term, I operationalise it by merging the approaches of Miller-Idriss,Footnote 54 Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking,Footnote 55 and Mudde.Footnote 56 The far right encompasses political ideologies characterised by the interplay of radical discourses and performances of nativism, nostalgia, authoritarianism, masculinism, exclusionary populism, and (ultra)nationalism aimed at reshaping society. Scholars like Castelli GattinaraFootnote 57 further problematise its definition by highlighting differences between ‘strands’ like radical right, neo-fascism, and right-wing populism; their milieus, such as formal parties, militias, and social movements, and their spatial iterations, e.g. national, local, online. I tackle this definitional issue via Norocel’s notion of ‘the far-right continuum’, which criticises the fixity of organisational categories and discourses, proposing the far right as a fluid continuum reuniting parties, agendas, social movements, paramilitary organisations, and ‘loosely organised networks and subcultures’.Footnote 58
Understanding the far right as a continuum reveals its organisational, discursive, emotional, and spatial components as co-constituted and multifaceted. SD exemplifies this by adopting frontstage ‘respectability’ to position themselves ‘centrally’ in politics while using ‘backstage’ practicesFootnote 59 to mobilise exclusionary rhetoric in the media. For instance, the far-right conspiracy theory of ‘the Great Replacement’ featured in a 2010 SD campaign video, and while banned from national broadcasters, it gained 1.2 million views on YouTube by September 2024, influencing public debates in mainstream and radical milieus.Footnote 60 This ambivalence allows SD to perform as both a ‘respected’ national party and a decentralised network of far-right grievances linked to extremist movements, highlighting the suitability of the far-right continuum as an analytical concept.
What is ‘normalisation’?
The normalisation of the far right is a global phenomenon understood by Wodak,Footnote 61 Mudde,Footnote 62 and KrzyżanowskiFootnote 63 as the permeation of far-right discourses and subjects into the political mainstream and society. In Sweden, this is seen in the interplay of contiguous processes: SD’s relentless electoral progress;Footnote 64 the adoption of rhetoric by mainstream political actors;Footnote 65 the incorporation of far-right agendas into policy proposals like the Gestapo-like ‘Snitch Law’;Footnote 66 media pandering and platforming;Footnote 67 performative ‘moderation’ of far-right politicians;Footnote 68 and increased camaraderie between the mainstream right wing and far-right actors.Footnote 69 This advancement occurs through the far right shedding performative ‘radicalness’ to self-legitimise, via public institutions providing platforms for acceptability, and through the interpellation of far-right ideology as an ontological security mechanism amid ‘permanent crises’.Footnote 70
SD has a complex relation to democracy, recasting its defence around the ‘righteous’ (i.e. supremacist) discourse of ‘popular sovereignty’ and against its liberal iteration – a capitalism-driven system and discourse combining free elections, the rule of law, separation of powers, individual rights, and political pluralism.Footnote 71 On the one hand, far-right parties engage democratic institutions via tactics like ‘calculated ambivalence’Footnote 72 or ‘double-speak’Footnote 73 – statements with hidden, contradictory meanings aimed at appealing broadly while avoiding scrutiny. Parties like SD mobilise ambivalence in tandem with democratic safeguards, like ‘freedom of expression’ and legitimacy gained through elections. On the other, SD positions itself as the ‘true’ defender of Swedish democracy and its ‘real’ values, articulated around the principles of the ‘will of the majority’, welfare chauvinism, and ‘national sovereignty’.Footnote 74 This involves a reductive, illiberal (re)configuration of ‘democracy’ where social rights and duties are articulated around protecting the sovereignty of ‘real’ Swedes.Footnote 75 Crucially, SD’s democratic self-imaginary entails antagonising the ‘betraying’, ‘weak’, and otherwise-inefficient liberal counterparts and ‘their’ democratic model.Footnote 76
Liberal democracy becomes a tool for sanitisation and legitimationFootnote 77 and is often reduced to ‘electocracy’, where the far right adopts superficial ‘respectability’ performances to cater to liberal sensibilities. Simultaneously, they obscure attacks against liberal democracy by targeting its traits (e.g. cultural tolerance, gender equality) and ‘representatives’ (e.g. progressives, socialists). At the core of this veiled vilification lies the ultranationalism and nativism that characterises the far right in Sweden, highlighting its contradictions with liberal democracy: its Europhobia, anti-globalism, and belief in Swedish and White supremacy.Footnote 78 Democracy is a tool for the far right as its tenets can be perverted around the metonym of ‘the people’,Footnote 79 e.g. symbolically enshrined in SD’s prefix of ‘Sweden’ before ‘Democrats’. Thus, ‘democracy’ becomes an empty signifier normalising exclusion and supremacy, and a tool for recapturing lost jouissance.
The normalisation of the far right extends beyond electoral success and ‘tactical arrangements’, involving complex emotional, rhetorical, policy, and performative processes enacted by the ‘political mainstream’.Footnote 80 This includes mainstreaming conspiracy theories and ‘civil’ policy negotiations, leading to the assimilation of far-right discourses and rhetoric as ‘commonsense’ by liberal subjects.Footnote 81 This mainstreaming can be attested, for instance, in how Jimmie ÅkessonFootnote 82 and former Christian Democrat (KD) MEP Sara SkyttedalFootnote 83 mobilise xenophobic discourses as ‘popular concerns’ about immigration and Islam via technocratic frames of ‘efficiency’ and ‘law and order’. Krzyżanowski et al. describe ‘normalisation’ as ‘discourses and practices of “manufacturing” normality’ linked to crises that legitimise anti-democratic leaders and scapegoats threatening Others.Footnote 84 Thus, the normalisation of the far right is tied to the emotional governance of crises and the unconscious formation of identity, belonging, and ontological securitisation. This manifests society-wide in increased tolerance or even support for xenophobic, exclusionary, and supremacist discourses of ‘Europeanness’.Footnote 85 This ‘new normal’Footnote 86 is increasingly entwined with the jouissance-infused experience of ‘permanent crises’ that the far right discursively and emotionally exploits, which can be grasped in affectively intense moments like ‘victory’.
Despite its rise as a political force at the national and European level,Footnote 87 the far right rarely wins national-level majorities. This underscores the need to analyse their normalisation in moments of ‘victory’ beyond party politics, not least by exploring the unconscious undercurrents of political identity formation. This process involves examining the affective and socio-symbolic structure that frames and is revealed through moments of victory – i.e. how mainstream politicians enjoy victory alongside the far right. Political victories, as ‘festivals of excess’, expose contradictions between our affective investments (e.g. the elation of ‘Swedish wholeness’) and symbolic semblance (e.g. belief in plurality), revealing our anxieties. The anxiety-charged excesses of victory offer a temporal fulfilment of the social order’s promise of ‘wholeness’. ‘Partial enjoyments’-in-victory reveal the tension between semblance and affective investment of mainstream right-wing subjects, conveying (i) how they negotiate their identities via status-bestowing far-right fantasies and (ii) how the far right is normalised as a necessary yet outwardly disavowed provider of ontological security. Thus, the normalisation of the far right signifies the retreat of democratic values, ‘filling the gap’ left by liberalism. In the ‘crisis-ridden’ Swedish context, this interplay reveals contradictions between social democracy, liberalism, and far-right ideologies beyond electoral dynamics, contesting notions of belonging and identity experienced as jouissance.
Examining far-right normalisation through enjoyment and ontological security
GlynosFootnote 88 and ŽižekFootnote 89 argue that enjoyment is how ideology is experienced and sustained in power. Given its political quality, jouissance is simultaneously tied to and transcends the Lacanian Symbolic Order – the realm of culture, language, and law. Enjoyment also connects to the psychic orders of the Imaginary and the Real. The former concerns identity-forming fantasies that structure how we enjoy. The latter encompasses what eludes signification and symbolisation, the ‘visceral’ and traumatic dimension of jouissance.Footnote 90 As illustrated by the ‘Helg Seger’ incident, enjoyment is associated with libidinal, illicit, and disavowed emotions that counter prevailing norms of ‘acceptability’ yet are paradoxically encouraged by the Symbolic Order as society’s affective ‘binders’.Footnote 91
Rogers and ZevnikFootnote 92 argue that excessive moments and emotions converge into libidinal rewards within subject-affirming fantasies despite their transgressiveness to the social order – i.e. rewards linked to the ‘desire for excessive enjoyment’.Footnote 93 The transgressive moment where jouissance is ‘photographed’ reveals the libidinal dimension in ideology and its organisation through fantasy. For instance, the right-wing bloc’s ‘victory’ not only concerned electoral results and an administrative shift but was instead experienced as a wider repudiation of the centre-left Other embedded in a phantasmatic, retrotopian ‘reclamation’ over the long-betrayed kernel of Swedishness.Footnote 94 Glynos and StavrakakisFootnote 95 similarly tie the libidinal dimension to unconscious symbolic subordination and fantasies that shape subjectivity through othering – e.g. to a ‘new Sweden’. These libidinal rewards operate through fantasies, providing meaning to our relationship with the Symbolic and binding ‘subjects to the conditions of their symbolic subordination’.Footnote 96 For McGowan,Footnote 97 the depiction of the (ethnocultural) Other as an obstacle to ‘our’ jouissance is, paradoxically, the driver for racist and exclusionary enjoyment or the anxiety that mobilises desire to placate it. Hence, enjoyment can also be experienced in sustaining the social order, e.g. in contempt of Others who ‘illicitly’ enjoy in our/my stead.
Analytically, HookFootnote 98 operationalises enjoyment by examining the contradictions in the subject’s ‘rational’ and morally defensible beliefs and knowledge, as evidenced by outbursts or ‘slips of the tongue’. These expressions expose the inconsistencies in logical and ethical frameworks, performances, and norms that subjects claim as constitutive of their identities. Different modes of jouissance emerge in these contradictions, analysable through fantasies of ownership and belonging, as well as via affective commitments to their sociocultural signifiers like egalitarianism or ‘freedom’.Footnote 99 These modes of jouissance highlight how the Other is produced and associated with the role of ‘threat’ to enjoyment. Thus, enjoyment is a social-bonding intensity that shapes our experience of ideology and signifies its co-constitution with the threat posed towards our enjoyment and by the Other’s jouissance.
The loss of jouissance implies the sense of ‘prior’ ownership over enjoyment, now longed for, i.e. ‘lost’ in time. Jouissance is deeply connected to nostalgia as an ontological-securitising mechanism, for instance, evidenced in SD’s retrotopian formulations of ‘togetherness’ and ‘harmony’ as incompatible with multiculturalism and resting on mythical concoctions of long-lost ‘wholesome’ Swedishness.Footnote 100 While nostalgia merges dimensions of temporality, subjectivity, and memory,Footnote 101 I focus on its connection to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Hook argues that nostalgia operates as a historical screening device, preserving ‘select elements of the past while enabling a structured forgetting of others’Footnote 102 to protect the ego with a fantasy of belonging. Nostalgia helps to manage the anxiety caused by the loss of the object-cause of desire, ‘freezing’ or calcifying linear temporality to comfort the ‘grieving’ nostalgic with the hallucination of the fixed object. Nostalgia is hence the ‘attempt to ward off the movement of time’Footnote 103 by ‘returning’ to the solacing yet historically blindsided moment of ‘ownership’ of jouissance and the object-cause – the moment re-enacted in/by ‘victory’.
The position of the longed-for object-cause of desire as perennially threatened signifies its anxiety-inducing quality and political productiveness as ‘some-thing’ to be recaptured (e.g. by ‘righteous’ patriots) and/or that has failed to be captured. For Glynos,Footnote 104 this painful quest for sustaining desire through fantasy – insofar as it relies on sustaining lack rather than quenching it – is what the subject experiences as jouissance. The object-cause of desire incarnates this paradox by signifying both the promise of wholeness and the impossibility of its recapture. This unattainability triggers anxiety since the object-cause is what ‘sets our desire in motion’, and we crave desire to persist.Footnote 105 BurgessFootnote 106 situates anxiety in ill-fated attempts to make sense of our world through fantasy. These failures mark anxiety as an identity-altering affect resulting from encounters with real threats to our ontological security. Thus, anxiety is experienced as the painful enjoyment that sustains desire through fantasies structured by its lost object-cause. For instance, ‘Swedishness’ constitutes an ungraspable object-cause of desire, mobilising both right-wing and far-right discourses to quench the anxiety produced by its unattainability. This object-cause is painfully reminded through calcified, nostalgic narratives of a ‘thriving’, ‘modern’, and ‘united’ nation and crystallised in subtly exclusionary signifiers like folkhem.Footnote 107
Having examined the concept of enjoyment, I explore its relation with ontological security as a fantasy that promises to recapture the object-cause, thereby protecting us from the anxiety-inducing and jouissance-revealing encounter with the Real.
Ontological security as enjoyment-framing fantasy
Ontological security is intimately related to enjoyment since the former structures the shape of the latter, and the latter outlines the affective experience of the former. In this framework, the subject is fundamentally split, forming its identity by being recognised (and thus, desired) by the Other, a process represented in the moment of entrance into the symbolic order – i.e. ‘the moment of becoming a subject proper’.Footnote 108 In entering the social order, the subject renounces its pre-linguistic ‘wholeness’, losing its primordial jouissance,Footnote 109 which becomes sequestered and withheld by the authoritative manifestation of the Symbolic, the big Other. This split generates lack, thus producing desire located in an object-cause aimed at mending this void. This split prevents the subject from attaining a fixed identity, since desire cannot be satisfied. Instead, the subject is in the process of perennial ‘becoming’, attempting to fill in the constitutive lack that produces representational fantasies of a coherent identity. Thus, ontological security is a fantasy of impossible-to-stabilise subjectivity, incessantly oscillating between desire and lack.
Ontological security fantasies are crucial political artefacts since they tell us how to desire and enjoy ideology, while enjoyment constitutes the affective experience of political belonging. However powerful, fantasies need the Symbolic Order as a bulwark against their limitations since the brittleness of the phantasmatic ‘ideal identity’ of the subject drives it ‘back’ to the Symbolic Order.Footnote 110 This immersion into the Symbolic Order and compliance with the jouissance-withholding big Other frame the libidinal dimension of ontological security, marking it as a perverse fantasy of coherence and belonging relying on perpetuating the threatening Other. I thus categorise ontological security as both libidinal, since it structures desire-sustaining jouissance, and perverse,Footnote 111 as it assumes the position of the Other by withholding the promise of recapturing lost enjoyment through its punitive inversion – i.e. by effectuating lack and anxiety through ontological insecurity. This dynamic is illustrated by the Swedish far right’s mobilisation of dystopian anxieties embedded in present-day maladies as perpetual features of liberal modernity while promising (and withholding) the recapture of long-lost Swedish exceptionalism: togetherness, harmony, and a ‘righteous’ sense of supremacy.Footnote 112
This conceptualisation underscores the importance of fantasy as the structure of enjoyment and of jouissance as the experience of sustaining desire past anxiety. Within this framework, ontological security and insecurity are paradoxically co-constituted. Topologically, it resembles a Möbius strip,Footnote 113 simultaneously a dyad and a dichotomy unable to provide ultimate wholeness. Fulfilling the fantasy of ontological security would obliterate lack, and thus desire, depriving it of its stabilising ordinance and surrendering the subject to anxiety caused by the ‘lack of lack’. Therefore, ontological security sustains desire through ontological insecurity, which maintains lack – a painful tension experienced as jouissance.
Having discussed how jouissance is framed via ontological security to elucidate far-right normalisation, I will now ground this framework in Sweden’s case. Given Sweden’s widespread associations with ‘progressive’ values, this case offers a perplexing glimpse into far-right normalisation amid the global ‘retreat’ of liberal democracy.
The Swedish political context
Sweden’s proportional representation system allows smaller parties to enter parliament if they surpass the 4 per cent threshold.Footnote 114 Traditionally, the Social Democrats and Moderates have organised government formation through centre-left and centre-right coalitions, respectively. However, SD’s ascendance since 2010 has made them a pivotal force in Swedish politics. Alongside the Moderates, the right-wing coalition’s other parties – the Liberals and Christian Democrats (KD) – have varied parliamentary support histories. The Liberals, once centrist, shifted rightwards in the early 2000s, aligning with the 2022 right-wing coalition reliant on the far right. Meanwhile, KD has consistently supported right-wing coalitions. Despite widespread disagreements, centre-left and centre-right coalitions shared a common interest in defending democracy against SD until 2022.Footnote 115 This historical exclusion conceals a complex relationship between Swedish liberalism, social democracy, and the far right that transcends party politics.
Historical imaginaries and nation branding
The Social Democratic party’s historical dominance is linked to values of progressiveness, solidarity, welfare generosity, and openness, which characterise the semblance of modern Sweden. However, its role in normalising the far right complicates this clean-cut antagonism. Decreased electoral support since the late 1990s shifted the party’s economic and social stances towards the centre and centre right, including platforms like austerity and hostility towards immigration. This blurred left–right distinction allowed the far right to capitalise on former Social Democratic strongholds, like unions and the working class.Footnote 116 Social Democratic governments have also led welfare policies and discourses based on their historical values, which have been adopted by far-right exclusionary politics, including natalism and folkhem.
The origins of natalist policies in Sweden under Social Democratic rule are linked to social engineering and eugenics, involving the sterilisation and isolation of Others deemed lesser or ‘unproductive’ for the welfare state.Footnote 117 The early Social Democratic welfare state favoured the ‘healthy and fit’,Footnote 118 framing the nation as an organism prioritising ‘productive people’ without a place for ‘parasites’.Footnote 119 This eugenicist framework resonates with far-right conspiracy theories increasingly normalised by liberals, including ‘White genocide’ and the ‘Great Replacement’, which require pro-natalist policies to counter ‘threatening’, non-Nordic ethnic diversification.Footnote 120 Furthermore, Finnsdottir and Hallgrimsdottir argue that the rise of the far right in Nordic ‘welfare paradises’ stems from the ‘interplay of gender with ethnonationalist politics’ in Social Democratic models.Footnote 121 These models and policies produced a ‘zero-sum social good’, excluding the ethnocultural and ‘unproductive’ Other, framing them as a threat to the social contract.Footnote 122 Despite reforms, this exclusionary Social Democratic welfare framework contained the seeds for the far right’s rise and normalisation.
Another critical narrative linking social democracy and the far right is that of folkhem. Following Norocel,Footnote 123 Kisić-Merino and Kinnvall describe folkhem as ‘the [Swedish] people’s home’,Footnote 124 an ideology of material and communitarian satisfaction for ‘the people’. Its nostalgic appeal centres on the origins of the Social Democratic welfare system, signifying the material needs of ‘the people’ at the frontstage of the Swedish civilisational project. Folkhem, and the ‘rightful’ belonging to it, stems from the scientific-supremacist platform developed by early Social Democratic eugenicists and social engineers, who advocated for ‘dispassionate’, evidence-based policymaking for ‘societal betterment’.Footnote 125 In Lacanian terms, folkhem serves as an object-cause of desire, embodying the ‘primordial’ lost jouissance that right-wing and far-right actors seek to recapture.
The dark past of Swedish social democracy challenges the clear-cut contradictions between the country’s liberal and far-right traditions. This issue resonates throughout Europe, where erstwhile Social Democratic parties like Labour (UK), Socialdemokratiet (Denmark), and SPÖ (Austria) have adopted right-wing rhetoric and policies. Despite this, Sweden has been successfully branded with liberal values like solidarity, gender equality, and multiculturalism. This self-categorisation aligns with the concept of ‘nation branding’, which involves crafting a country’s image across political, economic, and cultural dimensions to convey a reputable semblance domestically and abroad.Footnote 126 Historically, Sweden has been marketed as a peace- and security-seeking agent of the global ‘common good’ and a ‘moral superpower’.Footnote 127 This progressive framing (self-)legitimises Sweden as a source of ontological security, relying on and reinforcing its reputation as a peace-seeking brand. Nation branding integrates emotions to specific spaces, beliefs, and values into broader ontological security frameworks fed by nostalgic narratives. Thus, nation branding shapes identities internationally, domestically, and personally, binding self-perceptions to presentations towards others.Footnote 128
Nation branding feeds into far-right normalisation by commodifying belonging and operationalising nostalgia, leading to politically mobilising anxiety if challenged.Footnote 129 Nation branding is a fantasy of categorical closure, defining and exporting the brand ‘Sweden’ through positive ‘liberal’ associations. Mandelbaum argues that this fantasy excludes the ethnocultural Other that ‘threatens’ the brand’s exceptionality: ‘[nation branding] sustains the im/possibility for full belonging through the temporal jouissance of exceptionality’.Footnote 130 BrowningFootnote 131 contends that the Nordic ‘good state’ brand remains a powerful phantasmatic ideal for the Swedish subject, which is tied to self-esteem and status, forming a ‘Nordic-binding’ discourse of ontological security. In Sweden, social democratic ‘values’ coalesce into a securitising and jouissance-rewarding brand, masking the historically murky relationship between liberalism, social democracy, and the far right as well as occluding the centrality of the latter’s beliefs at the core of the liberal civilisational project.
An illustration of the dark mirror to Sweden’s ‘progressive’ brand is the country’s history and normalisation of far-right discourses, experienced in the discourse of SD and, increasingly, the mainstream right wing. While this article focuses on these parties, their far-right discourses are rooted in Sweden’s history of White supremacy.Footnote 132 This includes authoritarian groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement and the Soldiers of Odin, as well as parties like Alternative for Sweden, which share ideological and organisational histories with SD.Footnote 133 Examining SD and the mainstream right wing highlights the contradictions that situate jouissance in the fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism and contextualise its experience through the ‘malign’ Other.
Blåsippans väg: The whitewashing of the Sweden Democrats
SD, founded in 1988 via the merger of neo-Nazi groups,Footnote 134 have attempted to whitewash their history and rhetoric, yet their reactionary ideological tenets remain. SD’s discourse centres on ethnonationalism, prioritising the political, socio-economic, and cultural ‘inherited essence’ of ‘real Swedes’ over other cultures.Footnote 135 This ‘heritage’ embodies the tension between an idealised past, an anxiety-inducing present, and a feared future. SD claims anti-Swedish forces threaten the return to an idyllic state of ‘socio-economic wellbeing and ethnic homogeneity’.Footnote 136 The Swedish ‘inherited essence’ is crystallised, for instance, in SD’s repurposing of the Social Democratic figure of folkhem as an object-cause of desire binding past (in its loss), present (in its absence), and future (in potential recapture) - framing the nostalgia of folkhem as the enjoyment of ‘Swedishness’.
Hellström and NilssonFootnote 137 argue that SD initially mirrored its neo-Nazi predecessors with transgressive public performances. To access the electoral milieu, SD gradually adopted more palatable, ‘professional’ representations,Footnote 138 symbolised by changing the party logo in 2006 from a torch to the blue flower blåsippan (hepatica). RobshamFootnote 139 notes this rebranding included the campaign song ‘Blåsippans väg’ (‘The Path of the Hepatica’), symbolising SD’s ‘heroic resistance’ as an underdog ‘showing the way’. Since the 2000s, SD has permeated the political mainstream, mobilising supremacist rhetoric, discourses, and performances into these spaces and through enabling centre-right actors.Footnote 140
The mainstream right wing: Between disavowal and enabling
SD has significantly impacted Swedish politics by embedding itself within the liberal democratic system. In 2022, it became the second-largest party and de-facto ‘king-maker’ in the Riksdag, with 20.5% of the vote.Footnote 141 This raises two questions about the ontological (in)security of Sweden’s mainstream right wing: first, the distressing prospect (Real) of irrelevance. SD’s rise signified the need for a formal alliance to defeat the centre left, as the mainstream right wing alone lacked a simple majority for government formation. Second, the potential identity crisis of the mainstream right wing under SD’s influence. SD’s popular appeal eluded the mainstream right wing, which struggled to adapt, mimic, or capitalise on its discourse, as evidenced by their seat losses in the Riksdag.
For instance, Jupskås’s analysis of the Moderates shows that before 2022, they adopted ontological-securitising strategies: (i) developing culture-focused ‘othering’ narratives mimicking far-right discourses,Footnote 142 and (ii) aligning rhetorically with SD by sanitising their radical content.Footnote 143 These normalisation strategies are also evident in Jan Ericson’s (Moderate MP) tweet celebrating the alliance with SD against the centre leftFootnote 144 and the Moderates’ shift from moral to technocratic criticism of SD.Footnote 145 Another example is Liberal MP Carl Hamilton opposing calls for the resignation of SD’s Richard Jomshof, Chairman of the Justice Committee, after his Islamophobic tweets,Footnote 146 while also claiming Islamophobia tends to be more tolerated than antisemitism by his political party.Footnote 147
The mainstream right wing symbolically enacts disavowal, (de)legitimising hegemonic contestations within the liberal order. Simultaneously, despite its transgressive core, SD’s sanitised rhetoric amid a ‘national exceptionalism’ crisis binds the jouissance of belonging to Sweden/Swedishness to perceived threats. Next, I deploy Hook’s analytics of enjoymentFootnote 148 to elucidate the normalisation of the far-right by analysing the fantasy that organises jouissance, Swedish exceptionalism.
Structuring enjoyment: Swedish exceptionalism as nostalgic fantasy
Swedish exceptionalismFootnote 149 is a fantasy that conveys Sweden as uniquely progressive in sociocultural values, traditions, and performances. This ‘brand’ signifies the nation as ‘exceptional’ and deserving of admiration. It encompasses various ontological dimensions, values, and affects, such as foreign policy, environmentalism, gender equality, neutrality, and egalitarianism. These elements oscillate between inclusionary (e.g. of refugees) and exclusionary stances (e.g. of foreign criticism/interventionism). This articulation materialises in ontological-securitising discourses of nostalgia-infused belonging like folkhem. Contemporary examples include a generous welfare state, egalitarian and multicultural policymaking,Footnote 150 safeguarding freedom and self-determination,Footnote 151 and the mainstreaming of feminist discourses.Footnote 152
Sweden’s progressive brand has long been recognised globally as a liberal exemplar of freedom, tolerance, and solidarity. Simultaneously, its polity has incubated and tolerated anathematic far-right discourses growing alongside rather than despite liberalism and social democracy.Footnote 153 The Swedish polity’s irresolute state can be understood as one of ontological insecurity, where competing discourses and nostalgic recalibrations destabilise the ruling social order. Despite these differences, Swedish exceptionalism entails the radical exclusion of both antagonistic politics and the Other’s threatening enjoyment.Footnote 154 Paradoxically, this ‘sanitising’ fantasy weakens the ideological hold of ‘mainstream’ political discourses over key signifiers like freedom, order, and solidarity.
The resulting decentring of Swedish identity manifests in its ‘exemplary’ reputation as democratic, non-interventionist, pro-welfare, and ‘caring’ – a self-image promoted by its own government.Footnote 155 Sweden is seen as a moral bastion in Europe for social-democratic and liberal values, a ‘shining’ success story of the EU liberal model.Footnote 156 This ‘liberal exemplar’ dimension of Swedish identity coexists with its far-right past and present, representing a ‘wholesome’, ethnically homogeneous Swedish past supported and desired by far-right advocates abroad.Footnote 157
Swedish exceptionalism is a future-oriented nostalgic (yet hollow) fantasy acting as a normalisation crucible buttressed by far-right advancement and mainstream right-wing retreat and submission. Rumelili argues that domestic-level surges in far-right support in Europe are a nostalgic defence against a prolonged state of ontological insecurity created by clashes between ‘state-level memory politics [i.e., official narratives] and individual experiences about the past’.Footnote 158 Moreover, far-right discourses are often and surreptitiously presented as ‘anti-nostalgic’ in their emphasis on the future of the nation, effectively occluding the repackaging of idyllic pasts as futuristic promises of wholeness.Footnote 159 Transposed to Sweden, this pits an increasingly delegitimised Symbolic authority (mainstream parties) against the oft-occluded nostalgia framed by ‘authentic’ SD discourses promising ontological security.
Homolar and Scholz frame nostalgia as a dyad defending against ontological insecurity, requiring both the joy of remembering the ‘exceptional past’ and the sadness of its loss.Footnote 160 Swedish exceptionalism’s hollowness allows for a nostalgic reclamation via far-right discursive tinkering of ‘time’ and ‘belonging’. ‘Reclaiming’ the past involves reassembling its comforting fragments into a promise of return, co-constituted with narratives of aspirational futures and an ontologically securitising present. Thus, Swedish exceptionalism is a nostalgic national branding exercise that obscures the intricate relation between liberalism and the far right, and the formation of identities around this fantasy of ‘clean-cut’ antagonism. The normalisation of the far-right is a fissure in this ontological security fantasy, revealing its political implications in moments of transgressive enjoyment. Paradoxically, Swedish exceptionalism is a fantasy that forces an encounter with the desire for ontological security and, thus, with the anxiety of its prospective unfulfilment, which is experienced as the jouissance of ‘reclamation’.
Swedish exceptionalism has been gradually dislocated by external (e.g. financial, health, and migratory ‘crises’) and internal (e.g. far-right) discourses, revealing two co-constituted issues. First, this dislocation exposes the limitations of the liberal iteration of this fantasy as a conveyor of ontological security. This is evident in the Swedish government’s defensiveness in adapting Covid-19 strategies according to EU recommendationsFootnote 161 and in the expansion of White feminism as a policy-backed benchmark for ‘equality’ and ‘progressiveness’ which occludes non-White, working-class women’s struggles.Footnote 162 Second, Swedish exceptionalism is an empty signifier, a battleground for reactionary discourses vying for its symbolic recalibration to cope with the failure of the modern liberal order. The fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism is thus reformulated by the dislocating retreat of the liberal project met by the far-right’s stabilising ‘reclamation’. This ontological (in)security condition triggers societal anxiety, experienced as the enjoyment of closing down categories of belonging against the Other who threatens ‘our’ exceptionality.
The threat of/to enjoyment in Twitter/X: Lessons from Sweden
Exploring how the rules of enjoyment are formed and operate in the symbolic site – the fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism – unfolds the two latter analytical dimensions of Hook’s methodology:Footnote 163 the threatening modes of enjoyment of Others and the modes of enjoyment that the mainstream right wing perceive as imperilled. The nostalgic fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism conditions how these modes of jouissance are experienced in the discourses of the mainstream right wing, in what I label the ‘New Swedish Right’. The analysis of these modes via tweets showcases how the libidinal dimension of the discourses of the New Swedish Right are formed in the ‘moment of victory’ and how they intervene in the normalisation of the far right.
The selected tweet sample was derived from analysing every original tweet and reply from five highly followed accounts of prominent politicians from the ‘mainstream’ coalition members (Liberals, Moderates, and Christian Democrats) and four from SD between 10 and 16 September 2022 (see online appendix).Footnote 164 I analytically define this period as the ‘moment of victory’.Footnote 165 Using Hook’s framework, I manually analysed the jouissance-revealing interplay of emotions in the tweet sample embedded in symbolic ‘contradictions’, including sadism, gloating, elation, and self-righteousness. I focused on tweets from the ‘mainstream’ coalition members that best illustrated enjoyment’s interplay with ontological security and the process of far-right normalisation. In short, the manifestations of jouissance in the illustrative tweet sample were analysed according to the background on far-right normalisation and ontological security, and deriving from the phantasmatic coordinate of Swedish exceptionalism.
Analysing these modes requires understanding how the ‘defence’ of jouissance against the threatening Other is enjoyed by the right-wing subject. The features and conveyance of the threats to jouissance condition the enjoyment of its ‘defence’, shaping the subject’s identity. This ‘defence’ is complex, as the fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism is contested by discourses vying to claim ‘who’ constitutes a threat, ‘what’ is the imperilled object-cause of desire, and how enjoyment can be experienced and sequestered. These fluctuating dimensions of threat reveal how the far right becomes de-securitised and ‘naturalised’ into the liberal Symbolic Order at the cost of the latter’s imperilment. The identity-reforming enjoyment experienced by mainstream right-wing subjects showcases the perverse affective structure sustaining the possibility of far-right normalisation. Thus, the experience of and contestation to ‘threat’ in contexts like the ‘moment of victory’ reveal how far-right politics become normalised alongside the painful negotiation between the mainstream right wing’s identity and status.
The jouissance-revealing moment of victory constitutes an enlightening analytical lens to explore the mainstream right wing’s role in normalising the far-right. This moment transcends a single instance like ‘election day’. It constitutes a broader and fluid continuum pulling together narratives and emotions symbolically anchored in the instance that embodies the potential re-enactment of ‘ownership’ over jouissance – i.e. nostalgia-satisfying ontological security. ‘Victory’ encapsulates the experience of enjoyment of the right-wing coalition, who broadly targeted the centre-left ‘establishment’, excluding criticism against right-wing liberals (which SD nominally targets) and the far right (whose traits the mainstream right wing denies or ignores), highlighting the self-contradiction where jouissance can be analysed.
The threatening modes of enjoyment of (ethnocultural) Others
The context of the election frames the threat of the Other’s jouissance in two co-constituted dimensions: internally, it signifies the political ‘establishment’ – i.e. the centre-left bloc – and its media allies as possessors of a jouissance that threatens the nation or exceptionality of Swedishness. Externally, this threatening enjoyment is situated in the ‘thieves’ (e.g. immigrants, feminists, the EU), the un-Swedish, ethnocultural Other endorsed by the political establishment.
A narrative trifecta signifying this threatening mode of enjoyment is that of (un)freedom, (dis)unity, and (un)safety. In her elated celebration of the preliminary results, KD’s leader, Ebba Busch,Footnote 166 pointed to how, thanks to the ‘Swedish people’, everyone will (now) be able to be ‘safe and free’ to shape their lives in a (new) Sweden that the right-wing bloc will fight for. This attempt at capturing the floating signifier of Swedish exceptionalism decries an ‘establishment’ performance of Swedishness marked by unfreedom and unsafety, a social-liberal concoction in which jouissance manifests as punitive: restricting/controlling ‘liberties’ and availing policies, discourses, and peoples that – in the name of the enjoyment of multiculturalism – harm ‘the Swedish’. The contradictory categorisation of the ‘free Swedish people’ reveals the jouissance manifested in Busch’s elation – an enjoyed signifier of an illusory sense of cohesive Swedishness. KD’s devolvement into far-right thinking is inextricably linked to the victory achieved with SD, whose nativist discourse negates universal belongingness, threatening the freedom and safety of subjects suspect of un-Swedishness and the guarantors of those belief systems (i.e. the centre left). Thus, while superficially innocuous, KD’s ‘safety for all’ and ‘freedom for all’ discourses perversely reaffirm the exclusionary imperatives of SD in situating the Other as the threat signifying belongingness to the community of ‘all Swedes’.
This ‘threat’ towards the subject’s freedom can also be addressed in a tweet by Liberal parliamentarian Romina PourmokhtariFootnote 167 in the aftermath of victory, in which she signifies her centre-left political rivals as manipulative and uncivil due to the ‘threatening’ ways in which they convey their agendas. Here, the establishment’s threatening mode of jouissance resides in the interplay between dominance, incivility, and manipulativeness as obstacles to a fulfilling polity. The enjoyment in gloated self-righteousness paradoxically emphasises post-political ‘civility’, which contradicts Pourmokhtari’s silent treatment of her party’s alliance with SD. Here, ‘proper’ Swedish forms signify a freedom that has been ‘lost’ to the centre-left establishment while simultaneously occluding the nativist, anti-democratic, and racist (i.e. uncivil) content of SD. This contradiction reveals the traumatic Real of achieving status through submitting to SD’s discourse – i.e. betraying a manifest identity as liberals – which is masked by self-righteous rhetoric of ‘civility’.
Another narrative signifying the threatening enjoyment of ethnocultural others is that of cultural replacement. In the context of victory, this threatening jouissance was located in the ‘permissiveness’ of the centre-left government and the electoral advancement of the Islamic party Nyans (‘Nuance’). On the eve of the results, the Liberal Party MP, Robert Hannah,Footnote 168 sent a tweet embellished with heart-eyed emojis: ‘I love bacon!’. This was a reply to an Islamophobic tweet by the podcaster/influencer Omar Makram, who mocked Nyans by ‘announcing’ that he would convert back to Islam and stop burning the Quran, but he ‘would not give up bacon’Footnote 169. Hannah’s derisory, sadisticFootnote 170 support of Makram’s mockery towards the belonging of ethnocultural Others highlights an anxiety manifested as the ontological (in)security of a changing Swedish social, ethnocultural, and political landscape. The contradiction is that of Hannah’s purported sacrosanct belief in tolerance and multiculturalism, which is salient in his active support for LGBTQ+ causes. While indirectly gloating at Islam by piling on Nyans and ‘chumming’ with Makram, he dismisses the reformed identity of the political structure to which he (now) belongs – that of SD –; one that is actively pro-‘traditional families’, i.e. anti-LGBTQ+.Footnote 171 In this context, Hannah is elated in his portrayal of Liberals as ‘defenders’ of LGBTQ+ rights, dismissing criticisms pointed at their alliance with SD while gloating against these: ‘Liberals proudly wave the flag at our election vigil regardless of how much the left […] are upset about it!’Footnote 172
The bonds between the Moderates and SD also emerge when addressing the threatening mode of jouissance of ‘replacing the Swedes’. Moderate parliamentarian Jan EricsonFootnote 173 underscored the Social Democrats’ paradoxical downfall resulting from their ‘unreasonable migration policy’, which strengthened Nyans and weakened the governing party. This schadenfreude-infused comment – complemented by a condescending ‘they should reflect on this’ – touches on the ‘permissiveness’, unsafety, and unfreedom brought by the Social Democrats, who enabled Nyans to enjoy at the expense of Sweden, thus imperilling their own existence and the fulfilment of the ‘real’ Swedish polity.
The narratives of this mode of jouissance in the process of far-right normalisation highlight the tension residing in the discursive (re)appropriation of the fantasy of Swedish exceptionalism. The threatening modes of enjoyment of cultural Others embody the two-pronged process of contestation-appropriation, in which the ‘decayed’ centre-left iteration of Swedishness necessitates replacement, an ontological security ‘imperative’ that legitimises the exclusionary shape of right-wing enjoyment. Paradoxically, this ‘decayed’ order enables and legitimises the mainstream right wing’s sanitisation of the far right and its enjoyment. SD’s advancement is framed as an inevitable, normalised, or even necessary by-product of the civilisational betrayal brought forth by the interplay between the centre-left establishment and the ethnocultural Other.
The imperilled modes of enjoyment of the new Swedish right
The threatening modes of enjoyment of cultural Others are co-constituted with the jouissance deemed to be imperilled, ‘about to be stolen’ – i.e. the anxiety of replacement requires a phantasmatic object-cause to be replaced (i.e. Swedishness). The imperilled modes of enjoyment of the new Swedish right are signified by their theft by the Other, which transcends a specific moment in history or one ‘people’. This theft ontologically (in)securitises the fantasy where primordial enjoyment ‘awaits us’.
Two interwoven narratives of belonging highlight the dimensional interplay of enjoyment, its imperilment by cultural Others, and its relation to the normalisation of the far right: (i) ‘speaking truth to power’ and (ii) patriotism. The emotion and notion of struggle through righteous ‘stubbornness’ and ‘speaking truth to power’ as imperilled enjoyment is manifested in the role that discourses that vie for the ‘political centre’ – specifically, that of the Centre Party (Centerpartiet) – play in the context of victory. The Liberal party’s MP Johan Pehrson posted a tweet replying to Centerpartiet MP Ulrika Liljeberg, which solely contains a ‘selfie’ of Pehrson during a gym session, framed by a phrase in the mirror: ‘I am a stubborn bastard.’Footnote 174 Liljeberg’s tweet – conveying her busy work schedule and her ‘nervous’ attention to the election results – is contrasted by Pehrson’s defiance and masculinist bravado. Pehrson’s ‘macho’ contrast with the more concerned or cautious approach of Liljeberg signifies the Liberal’s relentlessness and ‘bravery’ in the elections as the imperilled form of jouissance that a ‘weak’ and ‘feminine’ centre-left ‘enjoying-Other’ disavows.
This gender-based virtue signalling of a ‘real’ way of ‘winning in politics’Footnote 175 can also be appreciated in Hanif Bali’s (former Moderate MP) tweet concerning Centerpartiet’s leader Annie Lööf’s dealing with the results.Footnote 176 Bali’s tweet – ‘When is Annie’s YouTube reaction video to her latest press clips coming out?’ (author’s translation) – is flanked by two tabloid frontpages showing Lööf crying in front of her supporters and captioned as ‘she cannot handle the loss’ and ‘we need a new party leader’. Bali’s self-righteous framing not only sadistically gloats and mocks Lööf’s electoral loss, public display of emotion, and ‘banal’ practices (i.e. using YouTube to reach her supporters) but also signifies the legitimisation of a wider chastising of a feminine, politically correct practice of politics in the political ‘centre’. This chastising signifies the dimension of imperilled enjoyment corresponding to the exceptionalism of Sweden – i.e. of waging politics like war, face to face, regardless of civility. While, superficially, Bali’s tension with Centerpartiet concerns their ‘betrayal’ (of allying with the centre left), this imperilled enjoyment – the ‘macho bravado’ – frames a masculinist, de-feminising political ethics, revealing the contradiction from which it emerges. This masculinist political performativity is rather characteristic of far-right discourses and contradicts the Liberals’ and Moderates’ principles of tolerance, liberal openness to debates, and gender-based egalitarianism. In advancing performative cruelty to defend an imperilled mode of enjoyment, the discourses of Liberals and Moderates normalise the far right.
The second narrative that embeds the imperilment of jouissance is that of the ‘defence of the nation’ or patriotism as signifiers of a sense of coherent self – i.e. the imperilled signifiers that the ‘real Swedes’ enjoy identifying with. On the eve of victory, MEP Sara Skyttedal (former KD) pointed towards the ‘betrayal’ of the nation perpetrated by the Social Democrats in their long-standing allowance (read: submission) to the EU concerning the regulation of labour laws around minimum wages – i.e. obstacles for the fulfilment of KD’s vision of Sweden in the international order.Footnote 177 In the context of the defeat of the Social Democrats, Skyttedal signified the ‘dimensions’ of the imperilled enjoyment of patriotism in ‘betrayal’ and ‘pride’. Her schadenfreude and gloating are framed by the Social Democrats’ conveyance as submissive to the increasingly ‘social(ist) EU’ – both entities which Skyttedal frames as un-patriotic, un-Swedish, un-democratic, and ‘losers’. Skyttedal’s Twitter account’s banner in 2023 – ‘MAKE EU LAGOM AGAIN’ – exposed the fantasy of structuring international power based on KD’s interpretation of lagom (i.e. wise and moderate) Swedish exceptionalism. Antagonising and materialising the ‘un-Swedish’ in the left-wing bloc and the EU represent a contradiction of KD’s explicit aims towards promoting a pluralist democracy and the strengthening of European solidarity. Skyttedal’s performance and her jouissance-infused gloating contribute to the normalisation of the far right by feeding into a nostalgic fantasy of Sweden increasingly shaped by SD. In it, KD has become mimetic and performative of SD’s vision towards the phantasmatic production of ‘their’ exclusionary ‘new Swedish right’ Symbolic Order.
Discussion: Threat, (dis)avowal, and normalisation in ‘victory’
Mainstream right-wing subjects reflect the anxiety-inducing tension between identity and status brought forth by jouissance. By pandering to and enabling the far right, they trade their identity (e.g. as liberals, pluralists) to sustain their status as relevant, desired by the Other. Their rhetoric increasingly mirrors the far right, conveying threats to the social order and facilitating the acceptability of far-right discourses by de-securitising them. Yet this trade-off and its accompanying jouissance expose the constitutive lack of the mainstream right-wing subject. The harrowing ‘exposure’ to the Real of an incoherent identity threatens their jouissance-rewarding status as authentic political interlocutors, especially during crises. In these contexts, mainstream right-wing actors can only guarantee ontological security by betraying their identity, paradoxically highlighting their inadequacy as legitimate emotional governors. Thus, their enabling of the far right manifests not only in rhetorical mimicry but also in their failure to contest the signifiers that structure social order. This sublimation of anxious inadequacy is evident in how they negotiate, perform, and enjoy ‘new’ identities (e.g. ‘hard-line’, ‘anti-woke’) by contesting Swedishness against the ‘progressive Other’.
Analysing the tweets in the ‘moment of victory’ provides insights into the increasingly frictionless identity negotiations between the mainstream right wing and the ‘legitimising’ status bestowed by SD’s fantasies. This tension centred on the anxiety and desire over Swedishness and its exceptionalism, co-signifying the jouissance-threatening Other. Dissatisfaction with the ruling centre-left stems from historical defeats, socio-economic stagnation, and the perceived collapse of exceptionalism. In the mainstream right-wing fantasy of Sweden’s downfall and salvation, these causes are discursively and emotionally co-constituted with far-right anxieties. Victory against the ‘betraying’ Other oscillates between ontological security and insecurity, offering momentary jouissance-satisfying reprieve yet revealing the Real of the mainstream right wing’s fickle identity.
The interplay between the three analysed coordinates of enjoyment underscores how the sublimation of far-right discourses, performances, and rhetoric into identity-(re)forming frameworks accelerates far-right normalisation in Sweden. Rather than disavowal, the analysed tweets denote an absence of SD, denial of their far-right features, and/or the promise of their containment. The status-seeking camaraderie between far-right and liberal politicians also highlights the norm-forming, socio-symbolic dimension of enjoyment beyond its transgressive nature – a collective process of emotional governance reframing ‘normality’. ‘Make Sweden Great Again!’,Footnote 178 ‘Make EU lagom again!’, ‘Helg Seger!’, ‘I love bacon!’, ‘I am a stubborn bastard’: the jouissance found in the ‘moment of victory’ both avails and unveils the Potemkin abstraction of the far right, signifying its ‘necessary’ incorporation into the ‘mainstream’ to confront the ontologically insecuritising threat of replacing Sweden, Swedishness, and its exceptionalism. The ontological securitisation of the ‘New Swedish Right’ mirrors the dislocation of Swedish exceptionalism, evidenced in oscillating inclusionary and exclusionary modes of enjoyment mirroring the far right. Its normalisation follows this jouissance-infused tension, revealing the features of far-right entrenchment within the liberal order.
Analysing enjoyment reveals an intriguing dimension of far-right normalisation, complexifying the fluid ‘trade-off’ between mainstream right-wing identity and status. The mainstream right wing’s emotions directed against the centre-left and towards the far-right function as an affective ‘buffer’. This conceals the ethnocultural Other as their true target and source of jouissance, marking their identity shift as submissive to the far right while painfully evidencing their symbolic commitment to the liberal order by ‘acceptably’ targeting the centre left. The transgressive, ‘un-buffered’ jouissance against the ethnocultural Other is ‘relegated’ to and partially experienced through the far right. SD acts both as the anchor of legitimacy for lost enjoyment and as the ‘disavowed’ antagonist, allowing the mainstream right wing to concoct an illusory, temporarily satisfying identity against it. The phantasmatic ‘centre-left buffer’ signifies belonging to the liberal order, defending against the jouissance of sustaining a desire for recognition or status that relies on pursuing identity-undermining, exclusionary ‘exceptionalism’.
The co-constituted process of normalising the far right and (dis)avowing its enjoyment showcases the tense reconfiguration of mainstream right-wing identity and its constitutive fantasies. In this coping process, the mainstream right-wing subject submits to the far right’s authority while performatively disavowing it, ‘jousting’ for the object-cause of desire, ‘Swedishness’. This performative antagonism becomes ‘consumed’ and legitimised as a coherent mainstream right-wing identity and is manifest in the ‘moment of victory’, where the promise of jouissance unravels. The emotions embodying enjoyment obscure its cause – political irrelevance – and reveal its transgressive repurposing in performative cruelty against Others, normalising the occlusion of the brutalities of power, injustice, and inequality in liberal democracies. For the ‘New Swedish Right’, Blåsippans väg has become the right way.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000895.
Acknowledgements
I offer special thanks to Catarina Kinnvall, Annika Fredén, and Malin Rönnblom for their thoughtful, thorough, and constant feedback to improve the quality of this article. I would also like to thank Rachael Garrett for kindly contributing to improve its readability and engagement. Furthermore, I wish to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, suggestions, and encouragement. Finally, I acknowledge that this work was supported by The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society (WASP-HS) through a Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg project MMW 2019.0228.
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