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Contesting far-right identification: Oedipal myth, embodied affects and agonistic choreopolitics

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Over the past two decades, far-right political parties have gained power, particularly in Europe, by capitalising on developments like multiculturalism, gender equality, LGBTQIA+ rights and social media influence.Parties such as the Brothers of Italy, the French National Rally and Hungarian Fidesz, among others, promote nationalist agendas centred on identity politics, traditional family values and scapegoating.Events like the EU enlargement (2004, 2007), the debt crisis (2009-18), migration surges (2015-) and health and energy crises (2019-) have fuelled their rise, with far-right groups often blaming immigrants for societal challenges, fostering discrimination, xenophobia and racism through the promotion of a monocultural, nativist identity.This article explores how to challenge such discourses and promote a pluralistic, intercultural view of identification.It examines identification through the Oedipal complex, interpreting the traditional psychoanalytic triad (Mother, Father, Child) in political terms, and extending it to a quadratic structure to incorporate the (ant) agonistic other.This approach, drawing on psychoanalysis, helps understand how exclusionary nationalist discourses are formed beyond merely ideological fantasies and how they can be contested, highlighting the affective and bodily traces of identification that shape agonistic subjectivities.Identification, as a psychoanalytic concept, has been most explicitly theorised in relation to the Oedipal complex, initially formulated by Sigmund Freud.Freud (Freud, 1921;[1923] 1960) described the Oedipal complex as a crucial stage in a boy's psychosexual development, typically occurring between the ages of three and six.In its classical formulation, Freud sees it as a triangular structure involving the child, the mother and the father.Initially, the male child experiences two distinct psychological ties: an identification with his father (the desire to be like him) and the choice of his mother as an object of desire (the desire to have her).At first, these ties coexist without conflict.However, as the boy's mental life becomes more unified, these attachments converge, giving rise to the Oedipus complex.In this
DOI: 10.1332/14786737y2025d000000047
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410459203
FWCI:
Cites: 7
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Related to: 10