ABSTRACT
The chapter explores fantasy and melancholia in relation to political and social violence. The author argues that violence is either “put” outside an identity (through projection) and/or inside it (through introjection), depending on how identities deal with lack. In fantasy that accompanies episodes of political violence and nationalist hatreds, it is argued, there is an overproduction of meaning and enjoyment of exclusion of the feminised other who appears as a threat to the possibility of “fullness” of the national identity. Violence is here related to a constitutive lack (or impossibility of representation) in every social identity and to the dynamics of covering up such lack, which include the creation of scapegoats. Melancholia, on the other hand, is related to a type of violence that is neither heroic nor sacrificial (as most cases of political violence which involve fantasy); it is characterised by the fact that lack is neither covered nor projected, but introjected instead. Not having a clear scapegoat for their own failure, melancholic subjects introject blame and hatred. If melancholia is no longer thought of as the right to recover the lost object, but as the mourning of the (lacking) Thing, both fantasy and melancholia could be seen as mechanisms for dealing with the impossibility of the real: its covering up would be constitutive of ideological fantasy, the 224attitude of exposing the space of lack characteristic of melancholia. Thus formulated, melancholia not only no longer informs struggles for political justice, but even produces violence—violence of a kind where the self and the other die together, or where self and other are together “only in death”.
