Initially started as a project on consumption, it is no coincidence that this book came to revolve around the role of fantasy in social life. Given the close relationship between consumption and identity, and corresponding to recent anthropological analyses of ‘identity’ as impossibility, I claim that consumption is one of the ways in which people try to substantiate their identity fantasies.

Fantasy

My use of the term fantasy is inspired by a number of recent works in which philosophers and social scientists show the benefits of applying the main tenets of Jacques Lacan's legacy to social scientific and historical theorizing. The most frequently raised objection with regard to the use of psychoanalytic theory in social sciences concerns using concepts and ideas that were developed for studying individual subjects and apply them to the social field. One way to circumvent this problem is by studying the social as the sum total of many individuals – assuming that, because the members of a certain community or society have shared the same experiences, their emotional reactions are also comparable. This line of reasoning not just runs the risk of wrongfully generalizing individual experiences and reactions, but fails to take into account the social aspect, in as much as this refers to the relationships between people. Inspired by the work of political scientist Yannis Stavrakakis on the political significance of Lacan, I have followed a different trajectory. My starting-point is the parallelism between Lacanian thinking on “the impossibility of identity” on the one hand, and recent anthropological insights on the intrinsic fallibility of the constructions anthropologists study as culture on the other.

According to Stavrakakis, there is no reason to maintain a strict dividing line between the individual psychological level – the traditional realm of psychology and psychiatry – and the collective level, to which social scientists and historians usually restrict themselves. In Stavrakakis's opinion (which is deeply inspired by Lacan's body of thought) the boundary between both is fictive. From the very moment an individual is introduced to the world of agreements and rules we term culture (described by Lacanians as the symbolic order), he feels amputated, or, as Stavrakakis put it, a “lacking subject.” Where culture requires classification, designation and valuation of experiences (this behaviour is male, that is female, this behaviour is correct, that is not), introduction to culture means to be subjected to arrangements and rules.