Cosmopolitan Figures and Cosmopolitan Literary Forms

Abstract

In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoj Žižek posits a fundamental antagonism at the core of social union: ‘All “culture”’, he writes, ‘is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize — to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis.’1 Žižek’s ‘radical antagonism’ recalls Immanuel Kant’s notion of ‘unsocial sociability’, and his discussion of social fantasies gives new resonance to Kant’s description of the state as a ’pathologically enforced social union’ (‘Universal History’, 45). For the poststructuralist Žižek, social union does not itself exist but is a social fantasy constructed to mask an originary antagonism. There is always a gap between our fantasies of social union and the underlying antagonism that prompts their formation. What this means for the nation is that it (like all other fantasies of social union) is inherently unstable: ‘every process of identification conferring on us a fixed socio-symbolic identity’, Žižek insists, ‘is ultimately doomed to fail’ (127).KeywordsNational UnionNational LiteratureSocial UnionSocial SymptomFrame NarrativeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.