Xenophobia during the pandemic: A Lacanian perspective

The aim of this article is: (a) to argue that the UK governments’ authoritarian response to the COVID‐19 pandemic is inciting a qualitative shift in discourse structures that are transforming xenophobia into a radically totalitarian force; and (b) to demonstrate that even ostensibly voluntarist libertarian discourse also creates conditions for the psyche that incite the same totalitarian xenophobic transformation. I use two approaches to the...