The Free Market as Fantasy: A Lacanian Approach to the Problem of Neoliberal Resilience

Abstract

Abstract The resilience of neoliberal ideology despite its repeated failings is a problem that continues to generate significant scholarly controversy. To theorize the enduring appeal of neoliberalism, this article uses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of fantasy. For Lacan, a fantasy is a narrative that structures our experience of reality, organizing our pursuit of desire. I argue historical neoliberal thinkers constructed a fantasy narrative in which the “free market” functions as the crucial object of desire. The fantasy determines a priori that all historical and material progress is a result of the free market, and that any failings can be blamed on its binary opposite, the transgressive state. Hence, the fantasy prepares in advance for its own failures, as each fresh crisis can be constructed as a failure of the state, and as evidence of the need to intensify the pursuit of the free market. To illustrate the role of fantasy in preserving and reanimating neoliberalism, I examine neoliberal fantasy logic at the G20 leader’s summits organized in response to the Global Financial Crisis. Across the G20 meetings, the dominant narrative of the crisis was reconstructed to fit the neoliberal fantasy, ultimately absolving the free market and instead focusing blame on the state.