Investing in narrations of apoliticality creates a fantasmatic grip on the theorist that seeks to make the subject feel certain in the face of their marginality. Default to unconditional hospitality as an ethical intervention into politics.

So how can we make sense theoretically of the affective and collective character of narrations of apoliticality? Fortunately, in the aftermath of what is sometimes called the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, we have an increasingly rich array of theoretical resources at our disposal through which the intransigence of narrations of apoliticality could potentially be theorised. Specifically, I want to suggest that the Lacanian notion of fantasy can help shed light on the grip of narrations of apoliticality, while Ahmed’s account of affect is helpful in highlighting the historicity of our affective investments. Lacanian accounts of fantasy have gained some currency in political theory precisely because of a sense that discourse-analytic accounts of the discursive construction of hegemonic formations need to be complemented by a theorisation of how and why such formations are able to win over subjects’ identifications and investments, and thus become largely resistant to counterhegemonic discourses (Glynos, 2001;Glynos and Howarth, 2007,p.148).Such an approach relies on a particular conception of both the human subject and the realm of language (what Lacanians call ‘the symbolic’) as marked by a constitutive lack, which the subject experiences as traumatic and seeks to overcome (Fink, 1995; Glynos, 2001; Stavrakakis, 2007). The logic of fantasy refers to the way in which subjects invest in particular identities or ways of thinking because they offer the possibility of overcoming this constitutive lack via a promise of order, coherence and stability, which in turn allows for ambiguity, uncertainty and vulnerability to be cast out to the margins (Glynos, 2011, p. 59). However, these fantasies of order and stability are in some sense ‘false’, as they are ontologically resistant to achieving full closure (or ‘suture’ to use Lacanian parlance) and so are always in danger of being undermined or contested. And yet because the subject invests heavily in the fantasy of order and stability offered by particular identities and ideological formations, such contestations will often be experienced as traumatic, potentially even undermining the subject’s very sense of self. Of course, these are fairly strong ontological claims about how the subject and power function, and I remain agnostic about the extent to which fantasy and lack structure all forms of power, ideology and subjectivity. However, in the context of the specific problem at hand, I would argue that narrations of apoliticality do often assume a fantasmatic character, and that there are three crucial dimensions of narrations of apoliticality that a Lacanian approach can help illuminate. First, as discussed above, narrations of apoliticality – particularly in their more totalising incarnations – serve to efface and marginalise ambiguity and uncertainty, often by recasting the potentially strange as simply a further instance of the familiar. A Lacanian account of the logic of fantasy might suggest that this happens precisely because the academic left has invested in the fantasy of coherence and order offered by narrations of apoliticality: although they narrate a political situation that those on the left ostensibly abhor, they at least provide a degree of ontological security, a clear frame of reference in which one’s own position of unambiguous marginality is secure. And although this positions the academic left subject as defeated

, that ‘theoretical investment in failure’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, p. xxx) can therefore, as Ahmed (2010, p. 178) argues, function as a defence against contingency and the possibility of disappointment. They can even, paradoxically, provide a source of enjoyment or pleasure, via the moralistic pride in marginality they sometimes engender (Brown, 1999; Özselçuk, 2006; Roy, 2009). Consequently, even though narrations of apoliticality are, in principle, underpinned by a desire for a return of politics, if one fantasmatically invests in narrations of apoliticality then the emergence of new forms of politicisation will very likely be experienced as troublesome, even traumatic, as they potentially disturb the deeply sedimented frames of reference that have come to constitute the symbolic universe of the academic left subject.10 This in turn suggests that we should not be surprised that narrations of apoliticality are so persistent and enduring, even in the face of new forms of politicisation and theoretical problematisation. Second, a further crucial aspect of narrations of apoliticality is the often rather underhand, covert way in which they are expressed. Although clearly they are given expression in the official discourse of published academic texts, they are also expressed in fleeting comments, contextualising remarks and ‘off the record’ comments in academic seminars, conferences and conversations. Lacanian analysts have drawn attention to how collective fantasies are often transmitted implicitly, largely because they may be transgressive of official discourse (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 148). There is perhaps something transgressive about narrations of apoliticality in the aftermath of the deconstruction of Marxism and the emergence of the new social movements, as they arguably betray investments in modes of thought and action that, from the point of view of current intellectual fashions, might be deemed outmoded. What this perhaps suggests is that even though intellectually the idea of an epochal withdrawal from politics has been challenged and deconstructed in some quarters, this need not translate into a weakening of the affective pull of such narrations. What happens, rather, is that they take on a rather shadowy, clandestine existence below the radar of ‘official’ academic discourse; again, there may be a certain degree of pleasure and enjoyment (or what Lacanians call ‘jouissance’) from investing in a frame of reference that some might consider to be anachronistic or transgressive of the ‘official’ line on contemporary theoretical fashions. The third key issue relates to the connection between the fantasmatic and the empirical. As indicated, one of the key problems with narrations of apoliticality is not just that they are empirically problematic (in so far as they do not correspond to the complexity of ‘actually existing’ forms of activism) but that, in Lacanian parlance, people become fantasmatically overinvested in narrations of apoliticality. It is perhaps not narrations of apoliticality per se that are problematic, but the strength of the attachment to such narrations. As Jason Glynos (2011, p. 55) points out, this requires a shift in emphasis from questions of empirical correspondence to the mode and strength of subjects’ attachments to narrations of apoliticality and depictions of the apolitical present. Fundamentally, what a Lacanian approach tells us is that an emphasis on empirical (lack of) correspondence, useful as it may be, can only go so far: narrations of apoliticality are problematic not necessarily because of their content, but because any discourse or frame of reference capable of ‘gripping’ subjects that can be invoked without empirical or citational justification should be subject to scrutiny, even if the discourse in question were to correspond well with actual empirical events (Glynos, 2011).This state of affairs is akin to Lacan’s infamous observation that even if a patient’s spouse really is sleeping with multiple partners, this need not render the patient’s jealousy any less pathological (Glynos, 2011, p. 54). The crucial point is that the affective pull of narrations of apoliticality takes on an existence, a life, to some extent independent of ‘actually existing’ political struggles, and the Lacanian logic of fantasy can help us understand this. However, what a Lacanian account perhaps misses is the historicity of our affective investments: Lacanianism is strong on the form and character of our affective investments, but is perhaps weaker when trying to understand precisely why particular objects, discourses and frames of reference become so sticky, so intractable. It is here that Ahmed’s account of the endurance and ‘stickiness’ of our affective investments proves useful. While Ahmed distances herself from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis by moving away from a subject-centred account of affect (Ahmed, 2004,p.11),her account nonetheless speaks to a very similar set of concerns to the Lacanian approaches discussed above, in so far as she is also concerned with making sense of the stickiness and intractability of social norms (Ahmed, 2004, p. 12). In so doing, Ahmed argues that certain affects, particularly negative ones such as hate and disgust, acquire force through repetition. For instance, offensive racial slurs, and their associated affects of repulsion and disgust, are only possible because they reference a particular history of associations between affects and bodies, such that particular affective orientations come to be seen as a natural response to some inherent property of the body or the object (Ahmed, 2004, p. 45). Therefore, through repetition and prior histories of contact, affects come to ‘stick’ to particular kinds of bodies and objects.This implies that the ‘stickiness’ of narrations of apoliticality is not random or arbitrary. Rather, narrations of apoliticality – and their associated affects of gloom, despair, pessimism, resignation and pain – index a particular history of defeats and setbacks for the academic left. Consequently, academic left disappointment with the present is perhaps not just a response to the particularities of the (a)political present, but also labours under the weight of a deeply sedimented sense of despondency in the aftermath of,say,Thatcher,Reagan,Bush,Blair and post-Cold War neo-liberal triumphalism. This in turn means that, to some extent, disappointment and despair have congealed into reflex, instinctive reactions for some radical theorists; perhaps disappointment has become constitutive of the academic left (and the left in general). Following Ahmed, we can say that the historical contingency of the left’s often despairing affective response to contemporary politics has, to a degree, come to be effaced: despair comes to be a necessary and inevitable response to the present, rather than a contingent response to a particular history that could have been (and could be) otherwise.This affective glue or stickiness effaces contingency and so blocks the possibility of alternative orientations towards the present, or at least makes them more difficult (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 92–3).The task, then, is to recover and reaffirm the contingency of our affective orientations, paving the way for the cultivation of an alternative set of dispositions that might weaken the grip of narrations of apoliticality.