The Eternal Jouissance of the Community: Phantasm, Imagination, and ‘Natural Man’ in Hobbes

Joanne Faulkner

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and De Cive each present an unromantic vision of ‘natural man’: a staple of social
contract theory and, pace Rousseau and Locke, often an optimistic depiction of humanity’s primary disposition,
and accordingly, our ‘essential nature.’1 As with other theorists within the tradition, Hobbes presents ‘natural
man’ in the guise of a thought experiment. He is posited not as an historical forebear to Hobbes’s political
contemporaries, but rather as a hypothetical result of the abstraction of human being from whatever gives it to
be socialized and cultured.2 But whereas for Locke this stripped-bare humanity would yield man in simple,
unmediated relation to natural law, and for Rousseau we find a human freedom all too raw, but as yet
untarnished by the foibles of mannered society, Hobbes is not so nostalgic about natural man. He represents,
rather, a state of being that we would wish to transcend and that, moreover, we should be willing to exchange
our freedoms for obligations in order to get past.

Notwithstanding Hobbes’s preference for socialized humanity, in this paper I apply psychoanalytic theory to the
task of demonstrating the extent to which his depiction of natural man contributes to a cultural fantasy regarding
pre- (or extra-) social existence most usually accredited to Rousseau’s ‘noble savage.’ Hobbes renders the
fantasy of ‘natural man’ more deeply ambivalent, however, endowing a bleak and dangerous dimension to our
understanding of uncultivated humanity. Such a fantasy, I contend, determines the social destiny of marginal
groups, not quite (or at best ambiguously) included by social contract into the political sphere: ‘native’ peoples,
the mentally ill, the stateless, women, and children. Construed broadly as social novices and even ‘innocents,’
these groups are the ‘protected’ and possibly threatening remnants of pre-contract, ‘natural’ anthropology. But
moreover, like the part that woman plays for Hegel as ‘the eternal irony of the community,’ 3 those seen to
approximately embody Hobbes’s ‘natural man’ are an ‘excluded inclusion,’ disrupting as they support the
Hobbesian state.4 This paper argues from a psychoanalytic perspective that individuals who are not easily
incorporated by the civil state come to play an important role for the maintenance of community identity and
desire, as objects of fantasy or ‘jouissance.’ Through a fantastic relation to these figures, regular citizens contain
and control their impulses and affects; and are thereby also compensated for the relinquishments demanded of
them by society. My contention is that the political community thus requires the specter of an anti-social
remnant of nature, about which it can fantasize, and whose segregation performs a pivotal function for the
maintenance of social order.

In order to sharpen the focus of this approach to reading Hobbes, I will rely not only upon the political tracts but
also his writings regarding the nature of perception and cognition. For, although Hobbes’s social contract
experiment is already ripe for a psychoanalytic interpretation, turning also to his notions of ‘fancy’ and
‘phantasm’ will enable a richer and more integral engagement between political and psychoanalytic theory.
Considered in terms of psychoanalytic theory, Hobbes’s musings about the nature of sensory perception and
imagination are cast in a new light, and deployed to reflect upon his political theory in novel ways. For instance,
we can then ask after the ontological and ethical status of ‘natural man’ and ‘the state of nature,’ as products of
the imagination, within the terms of Hobbes’s own philosophical system. What is the significance of Hobbes’s
gesture of founding his system by invoking its outside 5—or modes of address (the imaginary, fantasy) that
elsewhere he radically excludes from legitimate philosophical discourse? And what are the social effects of such
an including-exclusion? As will be demonstrated below, Hobbes’s curious manner of disavowal employed as
philosophical technique supports the disavowals he enacts at the political and social levels: his denigration of
the imagination implicitly reinforcing an exclusion of those individuals who do not embody the rational subject.
This gesture of disavowal, notably the foil of psychoanalysis, also provides the terms of reference through
which we can understand the citizen’s relation to the humanity they ‘other.’ I will therefore turn to
psychoanalysis for suggestions as to how to remedy a current political ‘praxis’ dominated by security, which
obscures a more ethical comportment towards our political others. Let us begin this attempt cautiously,
however, by revisiting the stakes of Hobbes’s political philosophy, rendered in terms amenable to a
psychoanalytic ‘treatment.’

Pitting Individual Rights against Civic Obligation

Natural man resides, for Hobbes, as a dark possibility within each of us; and as an object lesson against which to
cultivate our more civic propensities and values. Humanity’s natural condition involves, for Hobbes, an
unconstrained pursuit of one’s desires (conceived as rights), and impunity with regard to acts of violence against
those who would stand in their way. Corresponding to these universally defensible rights, however, is a shared
vulnerability to the claims of others. Without the protection of a sovereign (or its functional equivalent), we are
each prey to stronger or craftier rivals. 6 The state of nature is thus, he writes, a situation of “warre… [of] every
man, against every man,”7 wherein “the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” 8 Creativity,
commerce, and culture, through which humanity understands its difference from the lesser animals, would be
virtually impossible in such a situation. Upon the horizon of this mean and embattled existence, Hobbes thus
sets the commonwealth: a community of individuals who each tacitly agree to relinquish their claims to all that
they would desire in the name of a peaceful coexistence. Under the authority of this common power, we are able
to alienate, or contract, certain of our rights in exchange for obligations to one another, so that life and
subjectivity becomes more predictable and secure. Only in such a setting do promises come to be possible,
enforceable in the name of the law that binds humanity only within the walls of society.

The better to stage the cleavage between the state of nature and lawful society, Hobbes draws upon some basic
foregrounding precepts. The first of these is a mechanistic understanding of human bodies, morality, and
freedom that places him at the cutting edge of the science of his day; and opposes him to the scholastic account
of human being in vogue with his contemporaries. Accordingly, Hobbes characterizes thoughts as impressions
made by objects upon the senses, and imagination as residual of such impressions (“nothing but decaying
sense”9). The passions—desire and aversion, love and hate, etc.—are situated within this mechanistic universe
as the movements of bodies, such that love constitutes a movement towards the object that provokes it, whereas
hate is a movement away from it.10 Good and evil, likewise, are not found in objects themselves, but only in the
relations between bodies and the object that elicits a response in them. 11 Curiously, however, Hobbes couples
this physicalism with his second precept, ‘nominalism,’ according to which the truth of a proposition is
determined not by the contingent world to which it refers, but rather, by the correct definition of words that
comprise it. Hobbes’s nominalism is justified by appeal to authority; natural reason being our direct connection
to God the creator. Yet crucially, it is upon this nominalist basis that laws gain their force, for Hobbes, by virtue
of having been posited within a conventional situation by a legislator.

The uncomfortable, and by some lights oppositional, 12 coexistence of Hobbes’s materialism and nominalism
supports rhetorically the two scenarios that he attempts to flesh out for the reader in Leviathan: first—and within
the frame of his materialism—the brutal, simple, and unforgiving pre-contract life, wherein unconstrained force
is indifferent to notions of justice that might temper it; and second, Hobbes emphasizes his nominalism when
outlining a social existence that is mediated by law and regulated by convention, without which ‘justice’ could
have no meaning or relevance. What must be understood, therefore, is that for Hobbes there can be no appeal to
a common law outside the state. Feelings of camaraderie with our fellows, common purpose, and shared values
are features only of a social landscape, in which subjects have already subordinated their own desires to the
common weal. Conversely, feelings for others in the state of nature are reduced to the crudest ‘movements’ of
body against body: lust, envy, destruction, incorporation and fear. 13 Hobbes’s nominalism thus deposes his
materialism in the establishment of a political order—at least at the rhetorical level, if not ontologically 14—as
the human world comes to be organized in accordance with authority rather than shear physical compulsion,
thus transcending the state of nature.

But what does it mean that a life of contrary meanings, and of pure force against force, might be bargained away
for a life that finds its impetus and cohesion in words and conventions? What is sacrificed in this exchange? And
what is gained through it? Hobbes had hoped that the advantages of law and sovereignty would be clear to his
readers: why would we settle for a life of uncertainty and abject fear when we could live in peaceful and regular
coexistence with one another? (Remembering, also, that Hobbes addressed here a readership already living in
society, but which had been prepared to forfeit its benefits in preference for the dubious freedoms offered by
rebellion) To a great extent what Hobbes describes with his depiction of the accession to social contract—in line
with the Enlightenment tradition that he helped galvanize—is humanity’s progression from infancy to
adulthood.15 For Hobbes, the ‘rights’ belonging to ‘natural man’ amount to a somewhat infantile claim to all that
is within one’s purview. Importantly for Hobbes, these claims conflict: we squabble like children over
resources, women, prestige, and power. And for this reason, the capacity to fulfill one’s most basic needs is
fortuitous at best. Much of this battleground is characterized, also, by a relatively free traffic of emotions,
according again to the physicalist picture Hobbes draws of human passions and relationships in the state of
nature. Here, the passions express themselves openly until they are subdued by the passion of another. 16

It is in this context that we are now able to introduce the principles of Freudian psychoanalysis to humanity’s
‘primal scene.’ Indeed, there are surprising correspondences between Hobbes’s depiction of ‘natural man’s’
transition to society and Sigmund Freud’s account of the process whereby the infant learns, in commerce with
the (sovereign-like) parental figures, to negotiate impediments and achieve satisfaction in a socially acceptable
manner.17 Like Hobbes’s account of the state of nature, Freud’s description of the ‘drives’ is a materialist
presentation of basic humanity stripped bare of culture or sociability. The drive, as the ground of human action,

2
is defined as ‘energetic,’ or hydraulic: with a source, thrust, aim, and release. 18 But the drive is also extremely
plastic: it can be repressed and converted into symptoms; or else sublimated, so that gratification is deferred and
the drive’s energy put in reserve for a later, more ‘refined’ (that is, cultural) expression. The analogy between
these models is strongest where they turn to the organizing principle of social existence. Freud’s apparatus for
theorizing the passage between brute infancy and social acceptability is famously the Oedipus complex: wherein
the child learns that its dearest wish—to possess the mother in to-to—is socially proscribed, and, moreover, is
punishable by castration.19 The punitive force of the incest prohibition is, for Freud, paternal, just as, for
Hobbes, the authority that organizes the state is sovereign. This paternal-sovereign power must be regarded as
final if the child/subject is to be normalized; but they are also motivated to attain to the norm by the assurance of
compensation for the subjection of their desire to the law. For, whilst Freud’s infant is remunerated with the
promise of a mother-substitute (or wife) at the achievement of adulthood, the sacrifice assumed by Hobbes’s
subject purchases the sovereign’s protection. And for both Freud and Hobbes, society is supported by a
nominalist principle: it is the authority of the father/sovereign’s word that gives the law its meaning and force.20

If the resonances between Hobbes’s thought experiment and Freud’s depiction of the emergence of the subject
through the Oedipus complex appear striking, however, then his later 21 rendition of a state of nature can be
viewed even as a ‘tribute’ to Hobbes’s social contract scenario. 22 Freud’s proposal, in ‘Totem and Taboo,’
equals Hobbes’s pessimism and then raises it, by founding society precisely through the sovereign’s murder at
the citizens’ hands. This myth of origins is offered as a belated explanation as to how the prohibition against
excessive enjoyment that galvanizes subjectivity came to be in force—or how, in other words, we came to
internalize the ‘horror of incest.’ Extrapolating from a speculation made by Charles Darwin, 23 Freud posits in
our prehistoric past an event that enabled the transition from herd animality to humanity. Primordial ‘man,’ he
writes, lived in hordes organized only by “the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male …”: 24 the ‘primal
father,’ who monopolized access to females, driving out his sons once mature. Freud continues in a fairytale-like
vein:

One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so
made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what
would have been impossible for them individually … Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without
saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless
been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring
him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his
strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a
commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of
social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.25

The twist to the plot of Freud’s tale is that, after the act, the band of brothers, due to their ambivalent feelings of
both hatred and admiration for the father, came to renegotiate their regard for him—to the extent even of feeling
regret for their revenge against him. In turn, this guilt itself exerts a prohibition upon the excessive enjoyment
that is reserved only for the (absent) father:

The dead father became stronger than the living one had been … What had up to then been prevented
by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the
psychological procedure so familiar to us in psychoanalyses under the name of ‘deferred obedience.’
They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father; and they
renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus
created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very
reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex [parricide and
incest].26

Thus, for Freud society arises in direct consequence of a traumatic violence against a primal father, conceived as
the only ‘natural man’ in Hobbes’s sense—or the only one who ever had access to enjoyment unmediated by
social norms. Thus the primal father is akin to Hobbes’s sovereign, understood as the last remnant of nature
within the state.27 Yet significantly, for Freud it is his death (and then preservation in the form of a ghost
representing the symbolic ‘Law’) that brings social order. Whereas for Hobbes the sovereign imposes order and
regularity from above, for Freud it is the brothers who organize themselves—yet only with reference to a dead
father who is thus rendered all the more potent as the living signifier, or the force of law. The death of the primal
father signifies that such extraordinary enjoyment cannot be contained by the political system: he represents the
excess that must be separated from the social, and then incorporated within it—though at a distance—as the
myth through which it makes sense of itself. The myth persists as an imaginary reservoir for subjects’ fantasies

3
of transgressive pleasure; and thereby it allows them to siphon off excess desire and emotion so that they can,
rather, function as good citizens.

The ‘social contract’ analogy—for Freud as for Hobbes—communicates the idea that it is only through the
introduction of conventional laws, approximately agreed upon within the community, that we come to cultivate
our passions. This process of affective education involves regulating the emotions such that whichever could
potentially damage the social fabric is ‘contained’ by the fantasy. Much as an army might seek to ‘contain’ a
rogue cell whose purpose would be precisely to produce disorder, post-contract human being sets to controlling
those elements of the self that threaten social peace by subjecting them to the social contract, 28 and thus
affecting a split between untutored desire and sociality. Social humanity is ‘civilized’—that is, rendered fit for
social conduct—by means of a regime of training of the emotions, from the ‘outside’ in: from external
appearance (or artifice) and our relations with others, to an interiority that continually checks and normalizes
these movements.29 Likewise for Freud, what begins as a crude interdiction against masturbation 30 or
overdependence upon the mother (and, if we regress even further, against the killing of the father) later develops
into the ‘superego’: an internalization of the paternal function or facility for self-prohibition. 31

It is hopefully clear from this précis, then, that what is exchanged for obligation and social order in the name of
‘rights’ is the vestiges and investments of a wholly affective being. In order to ratify the social contract we must
relinquish the privilege to appropriate what- or whomever we please, or strike out against whoever gets in the
way. We give up our claim upon others, at least insofar as it would be unmediated by their own desires and
social convention. We also renounce the prerogative to ‘behave badly’; a phrase that only has meaning
retroactively, after the social contract in which social significance inheres. These renunciations are achieved,
however, by means of an act of suppression (or in our terms repression) that produces precisely the dangerous
kernel Hobbes remonstrates against in Leviathan, and which motivates his entire political oeuvre. If we translate
this back into the language of psychoanalysis, the drives and affects that are repressed to produce the political
body (as well as the ‘body politic’) create a reserve of excess energy, which will necessarily seek unexpected
and unconscious means of expression: as symptoms, pathologies, and fantasies. 32 By advancing this imperative
to repress antisocial passions, Hobbes thus creates precisely the phantom of social disorder he most fears: this
time, not in the form of diffuse and general ‘bad behavior,’ but rather as a more focused pleasure-seeking that
will vent itself against particular segments of the population, in order to protect communal integrity and identity.

If we look to his representations of ‘madness,’ the connections between emotional self-discipline within
individuals, the wellbeing of the state, and Hobbes’s repressive imperative become more patent. According to
Hobbes, madness is a condition of passionate excess; of being out of control of one’s emotions, and moreover,
of emotional display and dissipation. While ‘discretion’ is marked by a certain affective parsimony, and the
ability to adjudge people and situations carefully and in relation to their specific context, madness is for Hobbes
a mode of ‘indiscretion’: “To have stronger and more vehement Passions for any thing, than is ordinarily seen in
others, is that which men call MADNESSE.” 33 Notably, Hobbes’s conception of madness hinges almost entirely
on an external, surface, behavioral dimension of human being. 34 The inability to contain one’s emotions in
situations in which others can do so, and simple inappropriateness in one’s discourse with others, is thus
sufficient to mark a citizen as deviant and infirm. Quite remarkably, however, this formal conception of
madness, as ‘matter out of place,’35 leaves all citizens open to breakdown; to become marginalized and of no use
to society. Indeed, as Hobbes clearly states, in their proper place the “secret thoughts of man” do not render one
mad, so long as they are kept private. We are all, however, potentially mad: our sanity depends upon the ability
to repress and contain thoughts that “run over all things,” and thus to maintain a rigid dichotomy between what
is said and what remains unsaid; what is allowed to be displayed externally and what is kept ‘inside.’ And it
would seem that, unless this concealed thought-reservoir were meticulously guarded, then all it would take to
succumb to madness, so defined as “passions unguided,”36 is a failure of attention.

Within our psychic depths an abject ground is thus set apart in which all ‘bad’ thoughts can be hidden from
view, in order that in the civic realm we may behave appropriately. But for Hobbes the very creation of this
ground constitutes a new danger, because therein lies a place within the individual where social disorder may
find its nourishment. In a striking passage, Hobbes slides quickly from addressing personal madness to a
discussion of mass hysteria, sedition, and revolution.

Though the effect of folly … be not visible alwayes in one man, by any very extravagant action, that
proceedeth from such Passion; yet when many of them conspire together, the Rage of the whole
multitude is visible enough. For what argument of Madnesse can there be greater, than to clamour,
strike, and throw stones at our best friends? Yet this is somewhat lesse than such a multitude will do.
For they will clamour, fight against, and destroy those, by whom all their life-time before, they have

4
 been protected, and secured from injury. And if this be Madnesse in the multitude, it is the same in
every particular man, For as in the middest of the sea, though a man perceive no sound of that part of
the water next him; yet he is well assured, that part contributes as much, to the Roaring of the Sea, as
nay other part, of the same quantity: so also, though wee perceive no great unquietnesse, in one, or two
men; yet we may be well assured, that their singular Passions, are parts of the Seditious roaring of a
troubled Nation.37

Hobbes wears the stakes of this theoretical experiment on his sleeve: To leave a state of nature we must cultivate
vigilance with regard to our emotions which, even once we have trained them to ‘remain in their proper place,’
might become uncontrollable and dangerous at the prompting of less abstemious neighbors. The maintenance of
social order through personal continence is thus, according to Hobbes, our constant civic labor and duty; but an
impossible duty, which is why the sovereign is a necessity within Hobbes’s political order. For, notwithstanding
the desirability of social peace, the obligations to others that comprise the social contract are a burden upon
individuals’ bodies and psyches, and a regular source of discontent.

The inevitability of such discontent with civilization—understood as founded upon the training of the emotions,
or ‘repression of drives’—is an underlying register of Freud’s account of subjectivity. 38 Freud notes that the
contention that civilization is the cause of suffering is not rational:

This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that
we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention
astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that
all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources
of suffering [nature, bodily feebleness, and social conflict] are part of that very civilization. 39

And thus Freud restates the sentiment Hobbes had expressed in posing the social contract model: that society is
not responsible for, but rather ameliorates suffering. Likewise, Freud emphasizes the protections afforded by
society, and extols the virtues of the fruits of technology, which, he writes, are a “fairy-tale wish” come true,
and make us all “prosthetic God[s].” 40 Yet Freud also acknowledges that a sacrifice has taken place in order to
achieve these benefits.41 He writes,

it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct,
how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other
means?) of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social
relationships between human beings.42

What this ‘cultural frustration’ signals, according to Freud, is the ‘sublimation’ of the instincts, whereby
satisfaction is deferred so that the requisite tension is accumulated for the production of the kinds of activities
that characterize and enable civilization (science, art, politics, etc.). 43 The individual’s desire is delayed to the
extent that it can be rendered less raw or visceral, and more amenable to others—and so is born the socialized
subject. As Jacques Lacan articulates this in relation to the subject’s accession to language, a ‘cut’ is introduced
into subjectivity: the cut of castration, whereby an instinctual part of the self is alienated (cut off) in order to
produce the social, linguistic self.44 The pleasure relinquished in the ‘social contract’ finds its analogue in Lacan
in what he calls (after Freud) das Ding [the Thing]: the always lost ‘something’ our separation from which
institutes and orients desire, and to which desire wants to return. 45 Humanity, then, can be seen to persist only as
a ‘fallen’ mode of being, alienated from a primordial wholeness (das Ding) the subject continually attempts to
recuperate. The makeshift ‘salve’ for this split being is, according to Lacan, the pleasure afforded by fantasy.
Fantasy fabricates a sense of oneness by inventing a substitute ‘Thing’ (the objet a, an object of desire) that
allows the subject to gloss over its constitutive incompleteness. For the very idea that our being was originally
‘whole’—that there was ever an integration with one’s desire, or with the mother, or with nature—is itself a
palliative fantasy. Oedipus, the primal horde, Hobbes’s vicious and stateless collection of ‘natural’ men, is each
in its own way such a palliative fantasy, providing the impression of there having been something from which
we are now separated, something that we have relinquished, but to which we still might gain some (furtive)
access.

Let us turn, then, to the place of fantasy in Hobbes’s system of thought. After drawing out the connections
between Hobbes’s notion of fancy and the fantasy of psychoanalysis, we will be in a better position to
interrogate the meaning of the ‘natural man’ fantasy for politics after Hobbes.

‘Fancies,’ Phantasms, and the Fantasy

5
As the above exposition suggests, for Hobbes the greatest threat to peace is the individual; and moreover, the
subject’s most individualized, idiosyncratic portion: their hidden and private thoughts and feelings that daren’t
be spoken aloud. It is not passion per se that troubles Hobbes, so much as unbridled passion, or emotion that is
not trained towards socially harmonious ends. Our affections should serve contractual obligations to others, and
to the polis; and through such compacts the emotions can perform for Hobbes a socially adhesive function.
Despite this desire for social harmony and the ‘ties that bind,’ ironically, the affect that Hobbes ‘pre-approves’ is
the socially divisive ‘fear,’ at least insofar as it fulfils a rhetorical role for his reader: to rouse their commitment
to the sovereign. Aside from his suspicion against untrained passion, Hobbes also suspects the imaginative
element of cognition (which he calls “Fancy”): a dimension that he is ready to use towards his own figurative
ends in Leviathan, but which he views as generally too open to abuse and falsity to be of much use to the citizen
subject. Indeed, in discerning the essence and proper uses of Fancy, in his political tracts Hobbes pits it against
‘Truth’ and ‘Judgement,’ aligning the imagination with the disguise of Truth, appropriate to the poetic and

NOTES
?. In her book length study of Hobbes’s reception by his contemporaries, framed in the context of traditional and Reformed interpretations of
Genesis, Helen Thornton argues that Hobbes’s state of nature was implicitly interpreted by his contemporaries in terms of a tradition he
opposed: Aristotelianism, which valorized the ‘natural’ as both origin and telos. For this reason, his depiction of the state of nature was
viewed by many as heretical, as they assumed that it referred to humanity’s origins in the Garden of Eden, and so represented God’s
kingdom as imperfect. Thornton argues, to the contrary, that Hobbes’s state of nature refers to humanity after the fall, and the sovereign
state as a kind of redemption, wherein we are brought back into a sphere in which moral authority prevails. Locke and Rousseau,
conversely, represent the state of nature as a truly ‘original’ state, in which all are equal and free and morality is possible according to
natural law. Helen Thornton, State of Nature or Eden?: Thomas Hobbes and His Contemporaries on the Natural Condition of Human
Beings (Rochester, N.Y.: The University of Rochester Press, 2005).
2
. Norberto Bobbio argues succinctly that the ‘state of nature’ needn’t ever have existed for Hobbes and other natural law theorists to make
their point. Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. Daniela Gobetti (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 2-3. As Helen Thornton points out, however, Hobbes did conjecture that the state of nature probably existed prior to his own
society’s institution, and persisted in his time, for instance, in the Americas (Thornton 2005, 1). See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B.
Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1985), Chapter XIII, 63; 187.
3
. Hegel writes: Since the community only gets its existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving
(individual) self-consciousness in the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an
internal enemy—womankind in general. Womankind—the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community—changes by intrigue the
universal end of the government into a private end; transforms its universal activity into a work of some particular individual and perverts
the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament of the Family. Woman in this way turns to ridicule the earnest wisdom of
mature age. (G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), para. 475, 288)
See also Luce Irigaray’s ‘The Eternal Irony of the Community,’ Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 214-226; and Kelly Oliver, ‘Antigone’s Ghost: Undoing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,’ Hypatia: A Journal of
Feminist Philosophy 11[1] (Winter 1996): 67-90.
4
. For Giorgio Agamben—who famously also theorizes the ‘excluded inclusion’ as a foundational structure of political ontology—the state
of nature is included within the polis in the figure of the sovereign, who wields unlimited power over the citizen, conceived as a mode of
naked life. Here I will take a different tack, arguing instead that the state of nature is ‘included,’ or reserved for the citizen, through the
fantasies they project upon the ‘innocent,’ which thereby represents the state of nature in the polis. For Agamben’s account of included
exclusion, see especially Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: University of Stanford Press,
1998).
5
. This line of questioning undoubtedly evokes Giorgio Agamben’s thesis, that the sovereign state is ambiguously justified by the state of
exception, or the withholding of its own law. See especially State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005). Although this analogy is provocative, I will not be pursuing it in the present essay.
6
. Steve Beackon and Andrew Reeve provide a clear account of Hobbes’s social contract theory, and its implications for rights and
obligations, in terms of the legal institutions of his day. The pivotal difference between the state of nature and civil society, they establish, is
the existence in the latter of a protective power that underwrites all contracts and covenants. Where this is lacking (i.e., in the state of
nature), one cannot reasonably be expected to make covenants (where the performance of duties is deferred until a later time), as there is no
power to enforce them, and so this is not conducive of peaceful coexistence. See Steve Beackon and Andrew Reeve, ‘The Benefits of
Reasonable Conduct: The Leviathan Theory of Obligation,’ Political Theory, 4 [4] (November 1976), 434-5.
7
. Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 1, ch. 13, 62; 185.
8
. Ibid., 62; 186.
9
. Ibid., ch.2, 5; 88.
10
. Ibid., 23; 119.
11
. “But whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: and the object of his Hate,
and Aversion, Evill; And of his Contempt, Vile, and Inconsiderable.” (Ibid., 24; 120)
12
. For this view, see, for instance, Nicholas Dungey, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Materialism, Language, and the Possibility of Politics,’ The Review
of Politics 70 (2008): 190-220.
13
. ‘Self-preservation,’ as defined by Hobbes, on the other hand, is ameliorated by the social contract. As William Connolly puts this,
To live so as to avoid the risk of death, to cultivate the disposition to live a long secure life, is to convert oneself into the self-
contained self demanded by civil society. For the self-interested individual is a highly organized self. It is a self that must
regulate its utterances by the effects they might have on others, must convert its desires and impulses into interests, must govern
its passions by reference to dangers or disadvantages they might generate. The paradox of the self-interested individual is that in

6
oratory arts, but not “good History” or “Demonstration, in Councell.” 46 Hobbes’s caution with regard to the
imagination is due to its part in the stimulation of the emotions, and thereby to the stirrings of treason. The use
of the imagination in public discourse serves as the vehicle for a contagion of affect: the public use of reason
authorized by the sovereign, on the other hand, brings us closer to agreement regarding truth and social
wellbeing.

This contrariety of imagination and reason is not insignificant to Hobbes’s purpose. After all, reason requires for
its flourishing peace, and (to that end) the divestment of individual natural rights. And as we saw above, such
divestment amounts to the renunciation of passions (both in degree and kind) that do not conform to—and that
in their non-conformity, threaten—the body politic. That Hobbes conceives the imagination to be a somewhat
volatile assistant—not only able to serve reason, but also comprising its visceral threat—again signals the
importance to his political theory of a regime of corporeal training. For, as he expounds in The Elements of Law,
the imagination is essentially corporeal: the residue “remaining, and by little and little decaying from and after

its very individuality it must be oriented closely to the attitudes of others and the prospects of the future; it must regulate its most
individual impulses to regularize its external appearance.
See William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 29. The social compact through
which certain (brute and limited) freedoms are surrendered, then, allows for a more abiding sense of self-preservation, which takes into
account our flourishing and not simply naked survival; and the richness of our relations with others.
14
. Indeed, my claim is not that the world changes its fundamental character in the transition to society: rather, 1) words and laws are agreed
to in society, and so their significance gains force; and 2) While materialism is compatible with nominalism, Hobbes to some extent pits his
material account against his nominalism in order to demonstrate the vast differences in the quality of human life in society versus the state
of nature. The world and our relations continue to exist materially after the social contract, but human life takes on a more cohesive and
regular character through shared understandings about the meanings of words.
15
. See especially Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784),’ Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals, trans. Thomas K. Abbott, ed. Lara Denis (Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2005). Here Kant characterizes Enlightenment as the
emergence from a self-imposed maturity (119). Notably, however, Hobbes’s appeal to the authority of God and the Sovereign puts him
squarely at odds with Kant’s position in this piece.
16
. This is sympathetic with Melanie Klein’s account of the infant psyche, wherein individuals instinctively treat one another violently,
whether by cause of attraction to or repulsion from those around them; and in a raw contest of force against force, it is only a question of
which prevails. Anna Yeatman makes a case for the homology between Hobbes’s understanding of inter-personal relations and that of the
psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and the object relations school, in ‘The Subject of Citizenship,’ Citizenship Studies 11 [1] (February 2007),
105-15.
17
. Because of the homology between their accounts, I would argue that Freud ultimately reproduces precisely the same social fantasy as
Hobbes, which this essay sets as its task to critique. This is especially borne out in ‘Totem and Taboo,’ as addressed below. I will turn to
Lacan, rather than Freud, for a possible solution to this impasse in the final section of this paper.
18
. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,’ On Metapsychology: The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 11, trans. James Strachey,
Angela Richards (Ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 105-38.
19
. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,’ On Sexuality: The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 7, trans. James Strachey,
Angela Richards (Ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 315-22.
20
. The emphasis upon the importance of language and the father’s word to socialization is even more patent in Lacan’s psychoanalytic
theory, whereby the ‘nom du père’ (Name of the Father) is interchangeable with (and a homonym for) the ‘ non du père’ (the father’s
prohibition upon incest). We will turn to Lacanian theory shortly.
21
. While Freud first developed his theory of the Oedipus complex during his self-analysis in 1897, his primal horde theory in ‘Totem and
Taboo’ did not appear until 1913.
22
. Freud explicitly draws a connection between the individual and society when he writes “… we cannot fail to be struck by the similarity
between the process of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual.” See Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’
Civilization, Society and Religion, The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 12, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1985), 286.
23
. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo,’ The Origins of Religion: The Pelican Freud Library Vol. 13, trans. James Strachey, Albert
Dickson (Ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). Freud is referring here to Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1997).
24
. Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo,’ 185.
25
. Ibid., 203.
26
. Ibid., 204-5.
27
. With respect to this idea, Giorgio Agamben writes:
the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be
said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6)
28
. The self-interested individual of Hobbes’s theory is not intrinsically one who shuns the encroachment of others, so much as one who
coordinates their own inner movements such that they no longer constitute a threat to the community. This increases their possible
affiliations with others, and thereby the capacity to protect their own interests. The Hobbesian socialized individual has successfully
negotiated the transition from an outwardly oriented mode of being to a more internalized modality, wherein the borders between ‘inside’
and ‘outside’ are rigorously monitored and regulated. As Connolly puts it, they are “a domesticated human, an artifice made fit for
society.”(Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, 28)
29
. Friedrich Nietzsche provides a rich account of the kind of process of affective training—and inversion from external action to internal
reaction—socialization involves in his On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage
Books, 1989). Although Nietzsche is largely critiquing Rousseau in this piece, an acquaintance with Hobbes arguably hovers in its
background.

7
the act of sense.”47 In De Corpore Hobbes frames this more mechanically, in terms of what he calls the
‘phantasm’: an impression left upon the body by other bodies that we encounter.48 Cognition is here construed as
entirely corporeal by Hobbes, and as rigorously following the laws of physics. He relates that the phantasm is
the final product of a chain of events that begins with the (external) object. “Pressure” from this object travels to
the “innermost” part of the body (the heart or brain), 49 and is then sent back to the sense organ to produce the
phantasm: the ambiguous ‘progeny’ of the relation between subject and world.

The phantasm represents first, then, the body’s reaction to its environment, and a means of responding to its
demands; second, it is a proto-concept, tested and refined according to differences between impressions, and
with the use of the method (‘Ratiocination’) endowed by reason. On the one hand, the phantasm is afforded
through a relation to other bodies; on the other, it furnishes a means of making sense of these bodies, through
which we can then gather and organize knowledge. The basis for knowledge is catalyzed in worldly relations
between bodies, and organic structure determines what kind of sense a body is able to make of its environment. 50
30
. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,’ 316-20. See also in the same volume ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children,’
194-5.
31
. While the super-ego (or ‘ego ideal’) is an interior differentiation of psychic formation, further to the distinction made within the self
between id and ego, it is experienced consciously as a moralizing and judgmental (and even persecuting) inner voice produced as “a
substitute for the longing for the father.” This need to mournfully install or replace the father within one’s own psyche is related to the act
(in fantasy) of parricide committed by the child. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id,’ On Metapsychology: The Pelican Freud Library,
Vol. 11, trans. James Strachey, Angela Richards (Ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 376.
32
. Freud defines symptoms as substitutions for sexual enjoyment once sexual instincts and responses have been denied or repressed. They
are, in other words, the direct result of sexual repression. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexuality,’ On Sexuality: The Penguin
Freud Library, Vol. 7, trans. James Strachey, Angela Richards (Ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 77-8.
33
. He continues:
The secret thoughts of man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, blame; which
verball discourse cannot do, farther than the Judgements shall approve of the Time, Place, and Persons. An Anatomist, or a
Physitian may speak, or write his judgement of unclean things; because it is not to please, but profit: but for another man to write
his extravagant, and pleasant fancies of the same, is as if a man, from being tumbled into the dirt, should come and present
himselfe before good company. And ‘tis the want of Discretion that makes the difference. (Hobbes, Leviathan 34; 137)
34
. For instance, when he writes, “all Passions that produce strange and unusuall behaviour, are called by the generall name of Madnesse”
(Hobbes, Leviathan, 36; 140).
35
. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2003). In her pivotal work
of theoretical anthropology, Douglas argues for a structural conception of ‘dirt’ or ‘pollution,’ as “matter out of place” (44).
36
. Hobbes, Leviathan, 37; 142.
37
. Ibid., 36; 140-1. An example of this contagion of madness might be the scene from the film Network (1976) in which the disruptive news
anchor, Howard Beale, incites viewers to scream out of their windows “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
38
. Freud defines ‘civilization’ more fulsomely as “the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from
those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely, to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.”
(Freud, ‘Civilization,’ 278)
39
. Ibid., 274-5.
40
. Ibid., 280.
41
. Again Freud reprises Hobbes:
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and
which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right in opposition to the
power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force.’ This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a
community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that members of the community restrict
themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions … The final outcome should be
a rule of law to which all—except those who are not capable of entering a community—have contributed by a sacrifice of their
instincts, and which leaves no one—again with the same exception—at the mercy of brute force. (Ibid., 284)
42
. Ibid., 287.
43
. Ibid., 286.
44
. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), 313.
45
. Lacan writes in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
… the Thing is that which in the real, the primordial real, I will say, suffers from the signifier … (118)
… the Thing [is] veiled; it is by nature, in the refinding of the object, represented by something else [i.e., the objet a] (118)
See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, 1959-1960, ed., Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.,
Dennis Potter (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992).
46
. Hobbes, Leviathan, 33; 136.
47
. Hobbes likens, here, the work of objects upon the senses to the motion produced in water by an object that passes into it. See Thomas
Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1969), 1.3.1, 8.
48
. See Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy: The First Section Concerning Body [De Corpore] (London: R. & W. Leybourn, 1656).
(Early English Books Online), 4.XXV.2, 291-2.
49
. While George MacDonald Ross identifies this organ as the heart, Philip Pettit locates this function, as a ‘cognitive power, in the brain;
stating that the heart, instead, relates to the ‘motive powers,’ regulating the speed and volume of blood that determines the body’s responses
to impressions. See George MacDonald Ross, ‘Leibniz’s Debt to Hobbes,’ Leibniz and the English Speaking World, ed. Pauline Phemister
and Stuart Brown (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 27; and Philip Pettit, Made With Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics

8
The phantasm-image is then mobilized by pre-contract humanity to name things and thereby build a
Weltanschung; but prior to social order individuals forge rival world-views (naming objects differently), and so
also represent rival sovereignties to each other. And therein lies a danger regarding the phantasm’s social utility:
for, while it provides the only connection to a reality outside the self (whether this ‘reality’ is social or natural),
it is a reality that requires continuous checking and calibration in relation to the impressions formed by other
subjects—disagreement being the basis, for Hobbes, of strife.

Nevertheless at this stage—when it emanates directly from the object that causes it—the phantasm is at its least
contentious. In imagination, however, the source is absent, and so this impression is weakened, and liable to
form unlikely and more various compositions with other impressions. 51 The phantasm thus becomes a source of
anxiety for Hobbes to the extent that, even in post-contract humanity, it resists dichotomization between truth
and falsity. The production of phantasms through imagination comprises a purely creative capacity that may or
may not accord to ‘truth’ as socially sanctioned—and the phantasm is thus ambiguous in its social expediency.
The diversity, too, of his accounts of phantasm may indicate Hobbes’s uneasiness about the status of
imagination. Between The Elements of Law (1640), Leviathan (1651), and De Corpore (1665),52 for instance, his
applications of ‘phantasm’ equivocate, so that it belongs sometimes to both the senses and imagination and at
others only to the imagination.53 As such, the phantasm is an uncomfortably ambiguous concept for Hobbes, and
it is perhaps this very vagueness that seals its fate as a feature of the imagination he disparaged as weak,
indistinct, contrary to reason—and therefore socially divisive and precarious.

Recall, however, that there would be no reasoning concerning the empirical world without the phantasm, as
“The first Beginnings… of Knowledge, are the Phantasmes of Sense and Imagination.” 54 Hobbes identifies the
foundation of the realm of ideas with the phantasm: that chimera produced by the body in response to the object.
The phantasm is the lynchpin to Hobbes’s materialist account of both sensation and reason, furnishing him with
the ‘missing link’ between bodies and ideas that finally renders society possible. Yet when decoupled from the
worldly object, the phantasm is conceived as a departure from, and threat to, reason and society. Not only
knowledge, but also the very possibility of falsity and social insurrection inheres in imagination. Knowledge’s
most fundamental element is also most dangerous to it, and must be kept in check by means of a rigorous
conditioning of the emotions and thought. And as was argued above, such conditioning is embodied in the
establishment of a social contract, understood as a network of social obligations formalized in law and
guaranteed by the sovereign. The imagination with the passions is thus both a resource for the polis and its
internal enemy. Likewise, the figurative ‘natural man’ emergent from the depths of Hobbes’s own imagination,
haunts his account of social human being at each of its historical and conceptual junctures as what both animates
society and threatens its destabilization. The imagination, emotion, and natural man each represent the excessive
matter existing prior to social life, which is constrained, limited and transformed within the polis. Yet, as such,
these concepts originate in their own prohibition, supporting the polis as its mobile reserve of energy, which is
exhausted and excluded in turn.

It is at the point of its exclusion and prohibition that Hobbes’s doctrine of the phantasm most clearly resembles
the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy. The phantasm, like the fantasy, forges a connection between the subject
and its world. In Hobbes’s case this connection is potentially unreliable, straying from reality to the extent that it
is removed from its bodily source. But the phantasm approximates a truth without which there could be neither
thought nor society, and the problem that must be negotiated by means of the social contract is the competition
between phantasms that leads to social discord. The imperative, accordingly, is to produce a common phantasm:
shared cultural ideas and values through which our relations to one another and to the world are managed. And
this is the sovereign’s function. Insofar as phantasms are ‘wrong,’ then, their danger lies in being socially unruly
or unpredictable. The social contract, in this light, is akin to Freud’s ‘reality,’ or constancy principle: regulating
the subject’s quantum of pleasure in accordance with the exigencies of a social reality.55

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 13-16.

50
. In line with his material monism, Hobbes argues that all bodies (whether animate or not) produce phantasms when they interact with
other bodies. Animals are distinguished from inanimate bodies, however, in that they possess sense organs and memory such that the
phantasm is connected with sensation and is retained for further comparison and refinement; while humans differ from animals in
possessing reason and language, through which the phantasm is given meaning and may be subjected to analysis. See Hobbes, De Corpore,
4.25.5, 293-4. See also a discussion of Hobbes’s concept of the phantasm in relation Leibniz in Ross, ‘Leibniz’s Debt to Hobbes,’ 27-9.
51
. Hobbes, De Corpore 4.25.7, 295.
52
. Hobbes commenced work on De Corpore in 1642, however.
53
. See Michael Losonsky, Enlightenment and Action From Descartes to Kant: Passionate Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 48, n. 9.
54
. Hobbes, De Corpore 1.VI.1, 49.

9
In the case of psychoanalysis, alternatively, the fantasy is produced in excess of reality, as a crude remedy to a
harm inflicted by the disappointments and frustrations in our dealings with others. The fantasy enables the
subject to form relationships with others not because they are able to agree upon socially sanctioned ideas
(phantasms), but rather, because of the exclusion and prohibition that, for psychoanalytic thought, both founds
and characterizes our relations with others. That is to say, we form affectively dense bonds with others
according to their place in the frame of our fantasy: according, that is, to their ability to approximate or represent
the Thing whose loss founds subjectivity.56 By provisionally replacing the Thing, the other becomes what Lacan
calls an objet a: the “object cause of desire,” 57 or the object whose illusory proximity to the lost plenitude of
existence gives the fantasy its satisfying contours. Importantly, however, what the fantasy primarily signifies is
loss, or the notion that there is a deeper condition of enjoyment, meaning, and being in the other from which one
has been separated.

What the fantasy reveals, then, about the subject’s relations with others is the extent to which they are grounded
not only in obligation (as per Hobbes), but further, in ‘identification.’ Hobbes’s state of nature itself—as both
phantasm and fantasy—is characterized by what Lacan calls the ‘imaginary’ stage: a psychic order dominated
by a traffic of ‘projected’ and ‘introjected’ material. In the imaginary stage and Hobbes’s state of nature, others
are experienced as mere aspects or reflections of the self and, in turn, ‘I’ feel myself to be commandeered by
others. The competition and aggression (in the ‘state of nature’) that the social contract then regulates is the
product of such imaginary identification; 58 and to gain a sense of the abject fear that can accompany the
experience of the imaginary, we need only reflect that its character is most vividly recapitulated by psychosis.
Yet even after the imaginary stage is succeeded by the ‘symbolic’—Lacan’s analogue for the social contract, in
which the self is ordered in terms of its relations to others and to ‘the law’—remnants of the imaginary haunt the
subject’s social experience: in love relations; where there is competition for resources; and in relations of
conflict. Desire, for Lacan, is accordingly articulated in terms of, and moderated by, symbolic relations: ‘my’
place in a system of fixed positions. Yet it is also intrinsically bound to imaginary identification, whereby
“desire is desire of the other”:59 my ‘thing’ is alienated in the other—or in the (mirror) image of myself as other
—so that what ‘I’ want, and how ‘I’ understand myself, is intimately connected to what others’ want, and how
they understand ‘me.’ There is therefore transitivity between subjects in the social field (of desire). And, again,
this imaginary dimension to social life, remnant of the ordering of desire that takes place through the assumption
of law (signified in Hobbes by the social contract), finds its expression most especially in fantasy.
The fantasy most usually depicts the other, then, as having what the subject wants—or else as owning the secret
to their self, and the solution to their felt incompleteness. Slavoj Žižek famously elucidates this phenomenon in
relation to the European antipathy towards Jews, wherein the anti-Semitic person represents the Jew to
themselves, through fantasy, as the one who has what is ‘rightfully’ one’s own (whether this be money, or
women, or social cachet).60 In light of this, Hobbes’s petition to his readers, that they should willingly suspend
their ‘rights’ (or desires) for the sake of social order, rehearses and re-invokes the split of subjectivity through
which the fantasy (and as we shall see thereby also ‘madness’ and passion) takes hold of a community. By
instituting society upon the alienation of supposed ‘full rights’ and privileges (the ‘Thing’), Hobbes promotes
precisely the need for a compensating social fantasy—but one that, as Žižek’s example shows, attributes to one
group the abundance desired by the other. Hobbes’s illustrative phantasm, then, not only provides a satisfying
illusion regarding the missing Thing that orients desire and social life, but it also, in turn, can lead to pathologies
of social exclusion. Let us turn, then, to the place of fantasy in Hobbes’s political philosophy, before suggesting
an approach to social disharmony that does not necessarily lead to the formation of pathologies.

55
. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. 1, trans. James Strachey (London: the Hogarth Press, 1966). See also Joanne Faulkner, ‘The Body as Text in the Writings of Nietzsche
and Freud,’ Minerva—An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 7 (2003): 94-124.
56
. Lacan writes about the fantasy as what enables perception per se in Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
In the end, in the absence of something which hallucinates it in the form of a system of references, a world of perception cannot
be organized in a valid way, cannot be constituted in a human way. The world of perception is represented by Freud as dependent
on that fundamental hallucination without which there would be no attention available (52-3)
57
. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1981), 168. Lacan’s ‘matheme’ for the fantasy is $ <> a, meaning that the split subject maintains itself in relation to the other through
fantasy. But it is the perception that the other has what the subject is missing that lends to the fantasy its perceived fullness. See also Lacan,
Écrits, 313-4.
58
. See Lacan, Écrits, 1-7.
59
. Lacan writes:
… man’s desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as
because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other.
Jacques Lacan, Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, Trans., Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1968), 31. See also 84-5.
60
. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 114-116.

10
Fantasies of Eternal Jouissance

It is not difficult to see that Hobbes’s adoption of a train of reasoning that denigrates the imagination
compromises—or at least complicates—his argument as a whole, predicated as it is upon an imaginary
experiment. We know nothing of ‘natural man’ but what we can salvage, collate and calibrate from our diverse
experiences: and this extrapolation from what we know to what we cannot know is, according to Hobbes, the
very function of imagination, which compares our various objective experiences—or phantasms—and
synthesizes new ideas in relation to them. Through an appeal to his readers’ imaginations, therefore, Hobbes is
able to render for them a specter, ‘natural man,’ that does not exist and perhaps has never existed. Hobbes
evokes society’s ‘exterior’ negatively, in order to demonstrate the urgency of preserving the social order’s
coherence and integrity. And because the imagination is for Hobbes the only means of access to experience that
is not one’s own, it is inevitable that his discourse should depend upon an appeal to what we can plausibly
imagine.

In the hands of others, however, the imagination becomes a perilous rhetorical tool. Enabling us to envisage
modes of life different from our own, imagination may precipitate a loss of confidence in sovereign authority,
possibly culminating in revolution. It is by appeal to the imaginations of ‘men’ that, according to Hobbes,
sedition gains a foothold, beckoning them to the ‘fictitious’ attractions of something beyond sovereign rule. And
by provoking their unkempt passions, the strategic manipulation of people’s imaginations can set off a time-
bomb of what Lacan called ‘jouissance’: a perverse and excessive enjoyment, fuelled by discontent. For this
reason, and even within the terms of his own argument, Hobbes plays a precarious game by invoking our
emotional and imaginative capacities in relating human being’s progress towards socialization. His means of
attaining his readers’ agreement is qualitatively no different from those he admonishes as dangerous: 61 with the
exception that he uses the affect of fear, rather than hope or anger, to motivate our attitudes. 62

So let us articulate more precisely the interaction between Hobbes’s fear of the imagination, the value of his
‘state of nature’ as an imaginary experiment, and the place within this experiment of ‘jouissance’—or excessive
enjoyment—the fear of which both motivates individuals to enter society, and produces relations of
subordination and exploitation between social subjects. Hobbes understood the power of imagination and
emotion, and so believed they should be strictly regulated to conduce to social order rather than unrest. Thus,
much like Plato before him—and perhaps also the regulators and classifiers of today’s media—Hobbes was
committed to the control of poetry and the arts.63 In a well-ordered society subjects regulate not only each
other’s emotions, but also what one another have the capacity to imagine. We might think of this regularity of
‘fancy’ in terms of shared tropes and metaphors—as well as the arts and literature—through which we gain a
common understanding of concepts and values over time and place. But the underside of this regular
imagination, or culture, is a shared fantasy: the accumulated stockpile of thoughts and emotions that are refused
entry to the public exercise of reason, and to sociability. The communal fantasy connects us to what is
forbidden, and takes on the curious patina of fear and attraction engendered precisely by the prohibition against
it.

If for Hobbes, then, the imagination has a duplicitous character, both promoting and jeopardizing social
harmony, then it might be fair to say that his imaginary ‘natural man’—depicted as a kind of half man, half
beast; living in both abundance and terrible fear—gains its power over us precisely because of its duplicity and
ambivalence. For, while at a conscious level we may easily acquiesce to Hobbes’s directive that the state of
nature is undesirable, from that dark aspect of imagination, fantasy, the state of nature connects us to the lost
enjoyment alienated through the social contract: or, in psychoanalytic parlance, jouissance. Jouissance
represents enjoyment of ‘the Thing’: precisely that excessive enjoyment which—whether one’s own or

61
. Johan Tralau argues the interesting thesis that Hobbes engages in a kind of esotericism in his simultaneous disparagement and
employment of imagery in Leviathan. Simply, Tralau argues that Hobbes saw rational argument as insufficient to compel his readers to
subject themselves absolutely to the will of the sovereign, and so rhetoric and images that would motivate the passions was in order. He
writes: “The bewilderingly indeterminate beast leviathan… is supposed to supplement the rational account of sovereignty with an image
conducive to the kind of fear and awe necessary for absolute obedience to prevail.” See Johan Tralau, ‘Leviathan, the Beast of Myth:
Medusa, Dionysos, and the Riddle of Hobbes’s Sovereign Monster,’ The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia
Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76. Although this is a plausible thesis, I am interested here in the effects of this
strategy that Hobbes did not foresee, but could readily have anticipated, given his own philosophical writings and forewarnings.
62
. William Connolly elaborates upon Hobbes’s reliance upon the affect of fear (Political Theory and Modernity, 29-30).
63
. Hobbes does acknowledge a use for the imagination and metaphor, but only to the extent that it is guided by reason. In his preface to Sir
William Davenant’s epic political poem, for instance, Hobbes distinguishes ‘civilized’ men from “American savages” in terms of a
“workmanship of Fancy, but guided by the Precepts of true Philosophy.” See ‘The Answer of Mr Hobbes to Sir William Davenant’s Preface
Before Gondibert,’ Gondibert: An Heriock Poem (London: John Holden, 1651 (Early English Books Online)), 79 (also partially quoted in
Tralau, ‘Leviathan, the Beast of Myth, 65).

11
others’—must be kept apart from the ‘self’ in the social sphere. As we saw above, the ‘function’ of fantasy is to
negotiate a relation to this jouissance, such that the sense of loss accompanying social being is partially
transcended. The fantasy posits an intimacy with the ‘missing object’ the subject imagines would make her
whole were she to possess it; and thus it performs a remedial function. Yet the jouissance recreated in the sphere
of fantasy has a bearing upon social life, even if our relation to it is precisely what is repressed in order to
produce the socialized subject. This excessive, forbidden enjoyment is preserved in our relations of
identification with others, in the manner that we elaborate our desires and values, and even in the principles of
law.

To explore the extent of jouissance in social life, let us further elucidate its various meanings. The French term
‘jouissance’ provides a rich and fortuitous account of pleasure. First, it refers in colloquial parlance to sexual
enjoyment, and particularly orgasm, which the French also famously call ‘la petite mort’—the little death. Here,
then, we see jouissance represented as a pleasure that takes us to the precipice of pain, or even fatality. The
psychoanalytic sense of jouissance exploits this proximity of pleasure to pain and death. Lacan invoked the term
in response to Freud’s critical late essay, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ 64 in which Freud questions the
ubiquity of his own (perhaps impoverished) notion of pleasure. From his earliest neuropsychological writings,
Freud had defined pleasure as a state of equilibrium—of being undisturbed by sensation—where, by contrast, he
conceives of pain as a state of excessive stimulation. 65 Notably, Freud’s account of pleasure, as a reduction of
stimulation, resonates strongly with Hobbes’s view of social order: pleasure is here a moderate passion that
binds social relations, as opposed to the radical passions that precipitate social instability. Lacan’s concept of
jouissance accords more with the alternative Freud poses in that essay to ‘pleasure’ so defined: the ‘death drive,’
which satisfies itself by destroying equilibrium and peace, and opening the self to the ravages of the Es (‘Id,’ or
the instinctual aspect of self).66

Yet, thirdly, jouissance also refers to a much dryer, legal sense of enjoyment: the ‘enjoyment’ of property,
meaning that one is able to make use of a thing; and particularly, to expropriate its ‘surplus value’—that of it
which is most precious.67 In this regard, jouissance is more apparently pertinent to the social contract situation,
where what is said to be at stake is the regulation of rights to property and livelihood. According to a legal
mythology, jouissance (as the enjoyment of property) is first negotiated through the social contract. For Hobbes,
the purpose of such negotiation is to secure the inalienable right to self-preservation; and the sovereign’s
sanction to oversee orderly contractual process—or the exchange of goods—guarantees the proper management
of jouissance. Jouissance, the right to make use of a thing, is thus underwritten by the sovereign, and it is the
sovereign (or state) to which we must apply when determining these freedoms. Yet alternatively, we may
understand this legal notion of jouissance in the light of Lacan’s use of the term, as the appropriation of the
surplus value of the other in fantasy: or the use of our neighbor as a site of access to the lost Thing, in the guise
of objet a. For Lacan, in other words, we alienate our enjoyment in the mirror image through which the self
appears as other, and then manage our proximity to this disconcerting enjoyment (jouissance as excessive
enjoyment; as enjoyment that perforates the self) through our relations to others. 68 He discusses this negotiation
aptly in relation to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house… wife… servant… ox…’
etc.:

das Ding insofar as it is the very correlative of the law of speech in its most primitive point of origin,
and in the sense that this Ding was there from the beginning, that it was the first thing that separated
itself from everything the subject began to name and articulate, that the covetousness that is in question
is not addressed to anything that I might desire but to a thing that is my neighbor’s Thing.
It is to the extent that the commandment in question preserves the distance from the Thing as
founded by speech itself that it assumes its value.69

64
. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey (London:
Penguin, 1991), 218-68.
65
. Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology.’
66
. See Joanne Faulkner, ‘Freud’s Concept of the Death Drive and Its Relation to the Superego,’ Minerva – An Internet Journal of
Philosophy 9 (2005), 153-76.
67
. For an elaboration of the resonances between Lacan’s sense of jouissance and the term’s legal connotations, see Bruce Fink, The
Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 96-97.
68
. Lacan discusses jouissance in relation to the ‘neighbor’ (Freud’s Nebenmensch of ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’) in his Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 76; 80-4.
69
. Ibid., 83.

12
We can thus understand the legal resonances of jouissance as implicit within Lacan’s psychoanalytic treatment
of the concept: as an overwhelming pleasure that comes to be regulated, but also conceived in terms of, the
prohibiting and regulating symbolic law.70

The question remains, however, what of the status of those whom we do not recognize as our ‘neighbor’: those
understood to subsist outside the scope of the state contract—whose rights, then, are neither authorized nor
limited by the sovereign? All three dimensions of ‘jouissance’ can be seen to over-determine the manner in
which the political community deals with such peripheral subjects. First, the figure of the ‘natural man’ plays a
part in the commerce of everyday life insofar as we imagine someone (or a group of individuals) to own
unlimited enjoyment; and this disparity is ‘redressed’ by the meting out of penalties calculated to deprive them
of this enjoyment. For instance, single mothers are often represented by conservative politicians and pundits not
only as having transgressed the social norm of procreation within the institution of marriage, but also as having
access to an unfair proportion of communal wealth (receiving payments supported by taxes). Frequently there
are calls to enact punitive measures that would discourage single parents from applying for benefits, the
expressed fear being that young women are having babies only so that they ‘get something for nothing.’ As with
Hobbes’s state of nature scenario, social conservatives motivated by anti-welfare rhetoric would, on the face of
it, hope to ‘include’ single parents within the community by means of the sovereign’s sanction: thus their
excessive passions—and breeding—will be curtailed and regulated, and their consumption of public goods
brought into line with the rest of the community.

By drawing upon the psychoanalytic account of jouissance, however, we can gain a deeper understanding of
community motivations to normalize social outliers. Those permitted only a marginal status within the
community become objects of their jouissance not only because they are perceived as having what the rest have
renounced for the sake of social order. The community’s excess passion is also directed towards, embodied by,
and then managed at a distance in the person of the excluded subject. Recall that for Lacan jouissance is
opposed to pleasure [as plaisir] because it represents enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle; beyond what
therefore affords us a comfortable and conflict-free existence. As precisely the ‘surplus-enjoyment’ that Hobbes
counsels his good citizen to fear, jouissance—or ‘plus-de-jouir’—is both more-than- and the limit-of-enjoyment.
There is an important sense in which jouissance is no enjoyment at all, but rather a fascinating and seductive
irritation that takes the subject beyond itself. As Žižek aptly writes, “Pain generates surplus-enjoyment via the
magic reversal-into-itself by means of which the very material texture of our expression of pain … gives rise to
enjoyment.”71 Jouissance, then, is a manner of enjoying pain as a sensation, or stimulation. Emerging in a(n
imaginary) place of loss, jouissance enables the subject to negotiate their envy and resentment toward the other
we understand as existing in a state of unlimited flourishing. Jouissance thus becomes, in the fantasy, a kind of
joyful lament or mournful ecstasy, wherein what is ‘celebrated’ is one’s own loss; and what is enjoyed is one’s
pain—whether this be the ambiguous pain of sexual intercourse, or the envy felt towards an imaginary recipient
of a desired object. In contrast to the social passions that (for Hobbes) protect the polis, jouissance thus refers to
a pleasure that threatens the subject’s singular coherence. And notably, according to Lacan, jouissance’s
constant affective analogue is fear. Jouissance is what motivates the ‘oedipal’ child to flee an indefinite (and
potentially mutilating) relation with the mother in favor of the order and authority afforded by the symbolic
‘father.’ Likewise, for Hobbes, the unlimited jouissance, or rights to make use of property, represented by the
state of nature incites the requisite fear to galvanize political community.

Yet importantly, for Lacan, the subject cannot be safely quarantined away from its ‘surplus enjoyment’
(jouissance) by the symbolic ‘father’ or the sovereign, because jouissance is an integral element of social
relations with others; as well as the formation of the self. The subject constantly negotiates its own identity
through its social relations, and jouissance is the currency of such an economy. According to Lacan, ‘I’ will
continue to feel vulnerable to the other’s incomprehensible enjoyment, which threatens to reduce ‘me’ to an
instrument of their pleasure, or an object of jouissance. Yet at the same time, ‘I’ will also experience my own
pleasure as a threat to the extent that it is uncontainable or surpasses what can be represented socially. In this
theoretical context, Hobbes’s social contract narrative can be understood as an attempt to deal with anxiety
about the jouissance that muddies the limits placed between the self and others, and the self and its own
disavowed material. The social contract is supposed to bring into being the political life, conceived as a period
after unlimited jouissance; and to create an opposing realm outside the political in which whatever is irregular,
inappropriate, ambiguous, or threatening can be kept separate. The social contract promises security from
jouissance under the sovereign, protecting us from our vulnerability to one another. The ‘state of nature,’ then,

70
. See Ibid., Lacan’s reference to Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where sin (read: the Thing) is defined in terms of its relation to the
law.
71
. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997).

13
insofar as it is represented to us in the existence of ‘madmen,’ ‘savages,’ women and children, provides a
storehouse for the community’s jouissance. These marginalized figures are caught in a state of interminable
jouissance because they are conceived as separate from the economy of social sanction, and ‘prior’ to the realm
of conventional law. So quarantined, they can then represent for us a fantasy space in which we may empty our
excesses with impunity—thus foreclosing the possibility of madness. The ‘natural man’ incarnate as the social
outsider, then, functions as a placeholder for—and purifier of—the citizen’s jouissance, enabling us to manage
our access to pleasure without being ravaged and destroyed by it. In this respect, the citizen’s security is
guaranteed not so much by the sovereign, as by means of the domestication of ‘nature’ (or jouissance) that
comprises the un-integrated, peripheral subject. If, in times of perceived social crisis, the ‘citizen’ can find a
figure of excess upon which to project this anxiety, then order is apparently restored. In this light we can see that
perennial grievance against subjects like the single mother does not intend so much to recuperate them to the
community. Rather, for the communal fantasy to hold, it is imperative that they remain partially excluded from
the community; their ambiguous status maintained so that they can fulfill the social function of a repository for
citizens’ projected ‘surplus enjoyment’ (passion and fantasy).
The need to contain marginal subjects like the single mother, the madman, the criminal, or the juvenile, can be
seen in this regard as an attempt to secure oneself against jouissance, understood as excessive passion which
threatens the smooth operation of society and subjectivity. In recent years, with the rise of a political discourse
of security, the refugee has become a further pivotal figure through which to manage jouissance. Perhaps
reflecting a stateless volatility that threatens the very idea of national sovereignty, 72 refugees are frequently cast
as uncivilized and more prone to criminality, and as the cause of social problems within the established
community. Australia’s domestic political scene furnishes a poignant example of this trend. During the lead up
to the Australian Federal Election of 2001, the incumbent government was able to mobilize such prejudices to
great effect, notoriously recovering public opinion—and winning a ‘security election’—by demonizing a group
of refugees attempting to reach Australian shores. 73 The Minister for Immigration claimed they had thrown their
children overboard74 in order to pressure the Navy into rescuing them instead of turning their boat around; and
the Minister for Foreign Affairs reassured the public, “we’ve made it clear that they won’t be coming to
mainland Australia. They’re not types of people we want integrated in our community, people who throw
children overboard.”75

Notably, the predominant representation of refugees at the time cast them not as vulnerable and damaged people
fleeing persecution and injury, but rather as calculating individuals, pursuing an illegitimate claim to Australia’s
natural beauty and resources, and the right to their use. Refugees land in Australia, it was suggested, not because
it is the terminal point of a chain of events over which they have had little control. Rather, they were represented
only in their desire for the Australian way of life and a share in its material comfort. In the light of our
reflections about the role of jouissance in the construction of a social fantasy, it is perhaps not by chance that the
later ‘Cronulla race riots’76 were launched under the banner of taking back ‘our’ beaches from an apparent tide
of Middle Eastern youths. The immigrant, as other, has been identified here as the one in whom the citizen’s
‘Thing’ is alienated—in this case, the one who has taken over our beaches—just as the refugee’s jouissance
threatens our values and our ‘way of life.’ 77 The refugee represents within such rhetoric the individual prior to
the social contract, whose unlimited claims would cause insecurity as such. Yet furthermore, what is provoked
by this fantasy is a communal form of madness, which looks fairly akin to Hobbes’s description above of the
‘madness in the multitude’ that results from untrained passions and imagination. In the case of the race riots in
Sydney—as well as the moral panic unleashed by government rhetoric concerning what refugees were doing to
72
. See Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” The Menorah Journal, 31[3] (1943), reprinted in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in
the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978).
73
. For an account of the ‘Tampa’ election campaign of 2001, see David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory: How a Government
Lied Its Way to Political Triumph (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004). For an analysis of the Tampa ‘crisis’ in terms of fear and security, see
Richard Devetak, ‘In Fear of Refugees: The Politics of Border Protection in Australia,’ International Journal of Human Rights 8 [1] (Spring
2004), 101-9. See also Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Melbourne and Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
74
. Philip Ruddock told a media conference on October 7, 2001, “A number of children have been thrown overboard, again with the
intention of putting us under duress.” For a transcript of the coverage see http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2001/s412083.htm, last
accessed 26 August 2008. Note that the situation here is complex: not only did prejudices about ‘foreigners’ come into play against the
refugees, but idealized notions of the innocence of children were deployed in order to use their own children against them. This situation
demonstrates, then, that social fantasy is far from linear and tidy in its operation, but rather is over-determined, ambivalent, complicated, and
often contradictory.
75
. Alexander Downer, quoted in http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/article_1634.asp?s=1, last accessed 18 December
2007.
76
. See ‘Mob Violence Envelops Cronulla,’ AAP, printed in The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 December 2005,
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/mob-violence-envelops-cronulla/2005/12/11/1134235936223.html, last accessed 1 April 2008.
77
. The ‘processing’ of refugees in remote and off-shore detention centers—or what the government called ‘the Pacific solution’—further
signifies an attempt to take control of the other’s excessive desire (jouissance) at a distance, and thus protect the nation’s integrity.

14
their children—this madness serves the aims of the state rather than undermining them. The apparently
transgressive fantasy, then—through which frustrated citizens attempt to gain access to their excessive desires—
strengthens rather than discouraging the citizen’s commitment to state security. 78 The very madness that Hobbes
seeks to contain through the invention of the sovereign animates the subject’s loyalty to the state. But this is not
surprising once we recall that this madness in the multitude is prefigured in Hobbes’s own text, as abject fear of
life in the state of nature—or in other words, of one’s own jouissance.

Hobbes’s account of the development and management of subjects’ affective being contributes to the
cultivation, too, of a dangerous remainder projected onto the excluded quasi-citizen, and figured as ‘natural
man.’ Like the wayward phantasm—both foundation and polluter of knowledge—the ‘natural man’ is a specter
of Hobbes’s society and its inherent danger. For, Hobbes’s rational, affectively well-balanced subject requires a
place for the investment of its excessive thoughts and passions. The ‘mad man,’ the interloper, the child, and the
woman are only ‘included’ within the community by virtue of a function they play that assures their exclusion.
The uncultivated outsider signifies the citizen’s own alienated self; the volatile remnant of whatever must be
renounced in subjection to the law. As the object of fantasy, the ‘natural man’ is regarded anxiously, and
sometimes even violently, but always also with a degree of ‘jouissance’: enjoyment that cannot be recognized as
such, because it is infused with pain and denial. Perennially dogging discussions of political legitimacy,
civilization, and community values, are thus concerns about the control and containment of those who, whether
incapable or prohibited, cannot achieve full citizenship; questions, for instance, of how to educate children,
immigrants, and women,79 as well as how the community might better protect itself from their excessive desire.
Conceived of as unfit for the social obligations that would confer to them full citizenship, they represent—and
so are effectively left to—the ‘state of nature.’ This means that those who are unable to assimilate to the
community’s view of itself are assimilated to the community’s fantasy. The peripheral or marginal subject thus
carries the burden of the communal pool of excesses: as a screen upon which others’ individual unfitness for
society is accumulated and projected. Hobbes’s social contract thesis, and especially his account of how rights
are exchanged for obligations, furnishes one kind of explanation for this process. But his explanation of the
psychology of sensation—and especially his ambivalent account of the imagination—provides another. The
metaphor he subsequently evokes in order to motivate a commitment to his political vision animates a fantasy-
life that is both socially productive and potentially destructive of social bonds.

Insofar as the ‘natural man’ is conceived of as a mode of being always already lost to socialized individuals, its
relation to subjectivity after the social contract can be understood in terms of jouissance in each of the
implications outlined above: as an object of pleasure, of use, and of fear. Significantly, the single mother and the
refugee each embody excess—that pleasure denied to the rest of the community at the moment of civilization—
but they are also objects whose use is most highly regulated, and moreover, who become objects of pleasure to
others through this very regulation. Control over them is what gives pleasure; and it is through these individuals
that forbidden affects—hatred, intolerance, violence; as well as indulgence and hedonism—are acted out. We
can see this already in relation to women’s traditional role as guardian of the private sphere: wherein they are
sequestered along with lust, vulnerability, and generation, away from the ‘political.’ Academic feminism has
already done much to theorize this schema, and thereby render it visible. 80 Hobbes’s political theory, read in the
context of his theory of imagination, however, furnishes a site for a psychoanalytic intervention through which
the part and fates of other marginalized individuals may be illuminated. The complex relationship Hobbes
enacts in his theory to emotion, to the imagination, and to those individuals who inevitably fail to capitulate to
the demands of the sovereign, shores up a model of society by keeping at a safe distance (through fear and
psychological projection) that within each subject which threatens the state’s stability.

To the extent that governments perform this same maneuver, however, citizens will be alienated from
themselves and from each other. The recent emphasis upon ‘security,’ articulated by some politicians as the
primary role of government, not only reinvigorates the apparent currency of Hobbesian theory, but also sets into
motion the kinds of fantasy and psychological projection that establish and perpetuate social disparity. In order
78
. See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category,’ The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 1999), 89-101.
79
. In particular, see Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, ‘Des Femmes et de leur Éducation,’ Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris:
Gallimard, 1979), 392-433. For a sustained discussion of Laclos’s contribution to a more general preoccupation with the education of
women in eighteenth century France, see Jean Bloch, ‘Laclos and Women’s Education’, French Studies 38 [2] (1984), 144-58. See also
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s recommendations for the education of Émile’s companion, Sophy in Book V of Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley
(London: Everyman’s Library, 1974).
80
. See Oliver, ‘Antigone’s Ghost’; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Anna Yeatman, ‘Gender and the
Differentiation of Social Life into Public and Domestic Domains’, Social Analysis: Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 15 (August
1984), 32-49; and Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” & “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).

15
to avoid this way to violence and division, it is imperative to think our way through the complex of fantasies
inherited from state contract discourse—and particularly its direst expressions in Hobbes and some of his latter
day conceptual heirs. The cultivation of a reserve of fear, in preference to all other passions, yields a dangerous
fantasy through which to secure social order. Perhaps, then, we should take Lacan’s therapeutic advice
regarding the overcoming of neurotic dysfunction: to ‘traverse’ or ‘go through’ the fantasy, by taking
responsibility for the fantasy’s effects in one’s own life and upon those in one’s sphere. 81 In other words, the
imperative would be to recognize that the other does not enjoy the lost Thing that would make one whole, and is
not the cause of one’s suffering. For it is only through such a recognition of the place manufactured for the other
in the subject’s own fantasy narrative that the subject-citizen can then relinquish jouissance of—or the ‘right’ to
use/enjoy—them. In lieu of an identification with the other that merely annexes them to the subject (as the lost
piece of the self through which subjectivity is initiated), a new basis for inter-subjective relation could then be
established in empathy rather than fear. Likewise, in the twenty-first century, governments and political
communities should hope finally to ‘traverse’ the fantasy of the malignant, marginalized, and colonized other
through which sovereignty is asserted and maintained. By traversing the political fantasy of sovereignty and its
claim over ‘natural humanity’—driven by fear and concerns about security—we might instead imagine, and
then bring into being, a community that takes responsibility for its experience of the world and relations with
others.

81
. Lacan alludes to the end of analysis in going through the fantasy with reference to Antigone (as exemplary of tragedy) in Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 300, 303-4, 313. Slavoj Žižek elucidates, and radically expands upon, this notion in his own work, writing, for instance:
In the third period [of the psychoanalytic cure] we have the big Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element at its very
heart; and in Lacanian theory the fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic
kernel. At this level, the final moment of the analysis is defined as ‘going through the fantasy [ la traversée du fantasme]’: not its
symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a
lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing ‘behind’ the fantasy; the fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void,
this ‘nothing’—that is, the lack in the Other. (Sublime Object, 133)
And elsewhere:
Traversing, going through the fantasy, means that we accept the vicious circle of revolving around the void of the object and find
jouissance in it, renouncing the myth that jouissance is amassed somewhere else.
Slavoj Žižek, “The Seven Veils of Fantasy,” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1999),
209-10.

16