The Laws of Inclusion and Exclusion

In this chapter I explore how and why contemporary nationalist ‘defence leagues’ in Australia and the UK invoke fantasies of law. I argue these fantasies articulate with Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘nomos’, which holds that law functions as a spatial order of reason that both produces and is produced by land. Drawing on Foucault, Agamben and Brown, I demonstrate how subjects form and are formed by historically contingent relationships to law in the neo-liberal moment. Turning to Lacan, I show how nationalistic invocations of law provide nationalists with a fantasy that the nation’s law represents them and holds them together (as the nation itself). Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the big Other, I argue nationalists aggressively (re)assert law not only to defend the nation, but to ensure their own symbolic and ontological security therein.