of the state of nature hypothesis that posits the individual as primary. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he ridiculed, with great irony, the notion that in the beginning humans are, like Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island, providing for their own sustenance, living without dependency on others, without systems of labor, and without any common organization of political and economic life. Marx writes: “Let us not put ourselves in that fictitious primordial state like a political economist trying to clarify things. It merely pushes the issue into a gray, misty distance … We proceed from a present fact of political economy.”3 Marx thought he could discard fiction in favor of present fact, but that did not stop him from making use of those very fictions to develop his critique of political economy. They do not represent reality, but if we know how to read such fictions, they yield a commentary on present reality that we otherwise might not achieve. One enters the fiction in order to discern the structure, but also to ask: What can and cannot be figured here? What can be imagined, and through what terms?
For instance, that lonely and self-sufficient figure of Robinson Crusoe was invariably an adult and a man, the first figure of the “natural man”—the one whose self-sufficiency is eventually interrupted by the demands of social and economic life, but not as a consequence of his natural condition. Indeed, when others enter the scene, conflict begins—or so the story goes. So, in the beginning (temporally considered) and most fundamentally (ontologically considered), individuals pursue their selfish interests, they clash and fight, but conflict becomes arbitrated only in the midst of a regulated sociality, since each individual would presumably, prior to entering the social contract, seek to pursue and satisfy his wants, regardless of their effect on others and without any expectation of resolution, without resolving those competing or clashing desires. The contract thus emerges, according to this fiction, first and foremost as a means of conflict resolution. Each individual must restrict his desires, put limits on his capacity to consume, to take, and to act, in order to live according to commonly binding laws. For Hobbes, those laws become the “common power” by which human nature is restrained. The state of nature was not exactly an ideal, and Hobbes did not call for a “return” to that state (as Rousseau sometimes did), for he imagined that lives would be cut short, that murder would be unrestrained if there were no common government and no binding set of laws to subdue the conflictual character of human nature. The state of nature was for him a war, but not a war among states or existing authorities. Rather, it was a war waged by one sovereign individual against another—a war, we might add, of individuals who regarded themselves as sovereign. For it is unclear whether that sovereignty belonged to an individual conceived of as separate from the state, who transferred his own sovereignty to the state, or if the state was already operating as the implicit horizon of this imaginary. The political-theological concept of sovereignty precedes and conditions the attribution or suspension of sovereign status to the individual, that is, it produces, through that conferral, the figure of the sovereign subject.
Let us be clear: the state of nature differs among Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes, and even within Hobbes’s Leviathan, there are arguably at least five versions.4 The state of nature can postulate a time before society; it can seek to describe foreign civilizations that are assumed to be premodern; it can offer a political psychology that accounts for civil strife; it can describe political power dynamics within seventeenth-century Europe. I am not exactly conducting a scholarly review, but I do want to consider how the state of nature becomes the occasion for a certain kind of imagining, if not a fantasy or what Rousseau calls “a pure fiction,” then one that is centrally concerned with violent conflict and its resolution.5 As such, we can ask: Under what historical conditions do such fictions or fantasies take hold? They become possible and persuasive from within a condition of social conflict or as a consequence of its history; they represent, perhaps, the dream of an escape from the sufferings associated with the capitalist organization of work, or they function as a justification for that very organization. These imaginings articulate, and comment upon, the arguments for strengthening state power and its instruments of violence to cultivate or contain the popular will; they emerge in our understanding of populism, the condition in which the popular will is imagined to assume an unconstrained form or to rebel against established structures; they encode and reproduce forms of domination and exploitation that set classes and religious or racial groups against one another, as if “tribalism” were a primitive or natural condition that rears up and explodes if states fail to exercise restraining powers—that is, if states fail to impose their own violence, including legal violence.
In the course of this text, we will distinguish between fantasy, understood as a conscious wish that can be individual or shared, and phantasy, which has an unconscious dimension and often operates according to a syntax that requires interpretation. The daydream can hover on the border between the conscious and unconscious, but Phantasy, as developed first by Susan Isaacs (1948) and elaborated by Melanie Klein, tends to include a complex unconscious set of relations to objects. Unconscious fantasy became one basis for the Lacanian notion of the imaginary, designating unconscious tendencies that take form as images and that pull us apart or in different directions, and against which narcissistic defenses are erected. In Laplanche, fantasy is defined somewhat differently and in two distinct ways: first, as an “imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes”;6 secondly, in his discussion of “Fantasme” he makes clear that we are not confronting a distinction between imagination and reality, but a structuring psychic modality by which reality itself is invariably interpreted. Thus, he proposes a reformulation of psychoanalytic doctrine with the idea of “original fantasy” (what Freud called “Urphantasien”), which structures modes of perceiving, and operates according to its own syntactical rules. Thus, the original phantasy takes form as a scene with multiple actors disposed by vectors of desire and aggression. This last notion allows us to consider what is happening in “the state of nature” considered not only as a fiction or a conscious fantasy, but as a phantasmatic scene structured by multiple occluded determinants. In the following, I seek to reserve “fantasy” for most of the scenes of violence and defense that I consider, but in relation to Klein, where the term “phantasy” maintains a distinctly unconscious dimension, I reserve that spelling. I use the terms “phantasmatic” and “phantasmagoric” to consider the interplay of socially shared, or communicable, unconscious and conscious fantasies that take the form of a scene but do not for that reason presuppose a collective unconscious.
If we understand the state of nature as a fiction or, rather, a phantasy (and the two are not the same, as we shall see), then what set of wishes or desires does it represent or articulate? I suggest that these wishes belong neither simply to the individual nor to an autonomous psychic life, but maintain a critical relation to the social and economic condition upon which they comment. This relation can function as an inverted picture, a critical commentary, a justification, or, indeed, a ruthless critique. What is posited as an origin or an original condition is retrospectively imagined, and so posited as the result of a sequence that begins in the already-constituted social world. And yet, there is a yearning to posit a foundation, an imaginary origin, as a way to account for this world, or perhaps to escape its pain and alienation. This train of thought could easily lead us down a psychoanalytic path if we were to take seriously the idea that unconscious forms of phantasy function as a foundation for human psychic life in relation to its social world. This may well be true. However, my desire is not to replace fantasy with reality, but to learn how to read such a fantasy as yielding key insights into the structure and dynamic of historically constituted organizations of power and violence as they relate to life and to death. Indeed, I myself will not be able to offer a critical rejoinder to this notion of a “man without needs” at the origin of social life without engaging a conjecture of my own: one that does not start with me, but takes me up into its terms, articulating, as it were, the syntax of the social through a different imaginary.
One rather remarkable feature of this state of nature fantasy, which is regularly invoked as a “foundation,” is that, in the beginning, apparently, there is a man and he is an adult and he is on his own, self-sufficient. So let’s take notice that
