How Does the Nation Plug the Hole in Irish Constitutional Discourse?

Abstract

This article uses a psychoanalytical methodology to examine how the nation secures the ideological coherency of Irish constitutional discourse. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland makes a claim to embody the nation, but paradoxically it also seeks to invoke the nation as its own authorizing agency. Drawing particularly on the work of Slavoj Žižek, this article explores how the concept of nation, as a little “piece of the Real,” effectively conceals this cognitive gap. The invocation of nation in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland configures political subjectivity by appealing not just to liberal-legal universality, but also simultaneously to a fantasy frame of Irish nationalism. Psychoanalytical theory is valuable in this context because it allows us to treat the ideological address of constitutional discourse as one that fragments rather than constitutes the subject. The ideological operation of the nation is encapsulated by the “inevitability” with which the legal subject finds something of itself in the partial and contradictory accounts of nation that are articulated by Irish constitutional discourse. Crucially, the inconsistencies and contradictions in this melange of national images point not simply to the aporetic nature of legal origins, but to ideological efficacy of the nation as a foundation of legal authority.