Den förlorade nationen - fantasi och njutning i Sverigedemokraternas diskurs

Sammanfattning: This thesis seeks to examine the construction of national identity in the nationalist party the Sweden Democrats. By drawing on a theoretical framework informed by discourse theory and psychoanalysis this thesis highlights aspects of national construction which has been neglected by other studies in this field. By supplementing the more common discourse theory with Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is argued that the construction of national identity is not only a question of constructing otherness, from which the national identity can differentiate itself from. The national discourse is also constituted through the working of enjoyment, the affective investment which structures the nationalist discourse of the party. The results of this essay shows that the desire for the nation and its realization is tied to the production of two interrelated narratives: firstly, the narrativ of a lost golden era, where the Swedish nation existed as a self-identical and harmonious totality. The other narrative is the production of a fetischistic figure of alterity, which is held responsible for the loss of this national enjoyment - the foreigner. Hence the desire for the national identity and the recovery of the lost national object is bound up with the production of an other identity which has allegedly stolen it. Paradoxically, it is argued, the loss of the nation strictly coincides with its emergence.