Instead of solving their impacts—the 1acs extinction framing is and securitization plays into the cycle of desire in which we constitutively remain lacking and always insecure even when the fantasy is meet.

Security never seems to make any progress. This article has treated this aphorism as a symptom, arguing that security discourse is radically ambivalent to its threat object and eternally defers the experience of closure. To date, Critical Security Studies have explored degrees of ambivalence between security practices and their threat objects – such as constructivist arguments that securitisation doesn’t operate to identify and nullify an objective danger, but uses the figure of the enemy to reconstitute political identity and leadership (Buzan, Wæver, and De Wilde 1998; Hansen 2012a; Jackson 2005; McCrisken 2003). But this does not account for the repetitive constitution of threat objects. In the constructivist model states could potentially encounter the enemy and take satisfaction in its defeat – conjuring political identity through conflict memory (Connerton 1989; Heath-Kelly 2013; Winter 1995; Young 1993). Yet, upon vanquishing the enemy no tangible increase in ‘security’ is claimed by securitising actors. Instead, the security apparatus turns away and reconstructs the figuration of insecurity elsewhere. Despite their apparent differences, ISIS, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda replace each other as signifiers for the most profound threat to international order. This article has positioned the compulsive refiguration of enemies within an aversion to attaining a state of ‘security’. The radical ambivalence between security imaginaries and their threat objects is constituted through social fantasy, drive and desire. The compulsion to imagine enemies in security discourse is the result of libidinal economy – the process cannot stop without endangering the social fantasies of nation and international society. Enmity is repetitively staged because the castration of the subject generates lack, and lack must be effaced through the symbolic. Using psychoanalytic concepts, the paper reflected on terrorist imaginaries as symptoms of castration. Our entrapment in the symbolic order (castration) causes us to be haunted by the lost object which would reinstate our ‘wholeness’ (a state of security). By clinging on to object a, the subject is able to ignore her division. However object always fails to satisfy our desire, leading to repetitive imagination of replacement objects and the creation of a narrative about a foul, polluting presence (the enemy) which blocks our attainment of wholeness. Enemies can be substituted at will – replaced by other such figurations of blockage. It is drive, the appetite for the endless failed pursuit of ontological security, which generates the disavowal of security at the very moment at which it might be attained. If security were to ‘make progress’ it would expose lack as a permanent condition of being, damaging interpolation in the social fantasy.