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This article seeks to discuss and illustrate how employing theoretical elements and interpretative frames from Lacanian psychoanalysis might help to conceptualize and analyze the affective dimension of European identity. European identity, as constructed in the discourses of European institutions, is believed to be crucial in legitimating the political project of European integration. It is argued that in order to understand how "desire" and jouissance ("enjoyment") are active in this construction of European identity, we need to focus on the plotlines of the dominant narrative about Europe as articulated in official discourses. Using such an approach, I show that the EU's preferred construction of a European identity, which narrates the EU as a grand peace project, is structured around the sacrifice of "national" jouissance, which in turn becomes a site of political enjoyment through the mediation of an external gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key question regarding ideology is how we might explain or understand its ability to attract and maintain support from human subjects – in other words what has been called the ‘grip’ of ideology. In the following, we aim to show that such a grip needs to be understood as operating in three different modes. While most contemporary theories of ideology conceive of these modes as symbolic systems and thus understand their grip as generated through the structural inertia of being ‘taken for granted’ as the very fabric of our social lives, other scholars have instead emphasized the imaginary dimension of ideology – its ability to offer utopian horizons – and have elaborated on another kind of grip which focuses on the emotional attachment subjects may experience towards a certain ideological vision of the ideal society. But beyond these two modes, we argue that it is also necessary to consider a third in which the grip of ideology is constituted neither by its structural inertia, nor by its utopian eschatology, but in and through the offering of intense momentary experiences, sometimes of a transgressive or excessive nature, such as celebrations, political rituals or demonstrations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]