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Ornstein, 2008, p. 212) becomes an unconscious or conscious and sentence structures that language,” through the fantasy
thrust for man and woman to imagine an ontological space of the symbolic order, allows (Belsey, 2002, p. 37). Deriving,
where their frustrations are alleviated, because as Freud (2005) therefore, in human beings who could certainly be conceived
claims, “The mind does not wish to continue the tension of the as subjugated to power of various dimensions (Lukes, 2005).
waking life” (p. 117). In this fictional ontological space, all Thus, if power is to be envisaged as “the ability (potential or
that is disappointing regarding our existence becomes magi- capacity) . . . to exert influence” (Sutherland, Gosling, &
cally transformed into everything we ever wished. Jelinek, 2015, p. 609), then not only the influence of some
By and large, order is the ultimate human fantasy: the humans over others must be acknowledged but, more impor-
dream to live in a universe that far from being the result of tantly, the influence of the natural, physical, biological, and
the accidents of history emerges, by contrast, from purpose- symbolic forces must be recognized too. So that the subject
ful plans that bestow inherent rational connections between of power can be revealed for what it is: the subject of forces
everything that exists. Order is the primordial fantasy, galore.
because it dilutes the insupportable cognitive realization of
everything we cannot control and transforms it into the ideal From Ancient Types of Fantasies to Modern Ones
that everything that happens, happens for a reason (Varki &
Brower, 2013). In other words, one must not wonder so much The conventional human effort to fantasize a symbolic order
about the nonsensical essence of being, when one has been is usually characterized by an essential feature: that powerful
assigned the role of the CEO, the father, the mother, the son, fantasies emerge through a rift (i.e., an ontological rupture).
the president, or the student. Because when I am Mr. CEO, I Take, for example, the case of God and other human-made
am focused, and my being in the world becomes targeted deities, who usually remain at the core of many powerful
toward something, even if that something is just a delusion. symbolic orders that have for eons organized people. For
However, it does not matter how fantastical the roles built for long, humans have built these magical anthropomorphic con-
us are, the only thing that matters is that they give us place ceptualizations of almighty Lords that somehow control
within the chaos that surrounds us. In other words, in our whatever we cannot. Yet, the fantasy of God emerges through
efforts to “resolve the cognitive disorder created” by a world the rift—the rupture—between the natural and the supernat-
that was simply not designed to make sense (Balogun & ural, as Gods are usually (although not necessarily) con-
Johnson, 2004, p. 523), human beings, through our ideas, ceived as belonging to the ontological reality of a different
have come to construct symbolic orders (Freud, 1929). order than ours: the supernatural order (Wilson, 2014). Thus,
Symbolic orders that far from representing whatever chaotic God-centered symbolic orders have tended to be liminal in
and complex processes that govern nature (Gleick, 1988) the sense that they actually give order by connecting two dif-
merely edifice a fiction to allow humans to behave, like ferent realms: one is the natural realm (where things seem
Zizek (1989) argues, as if objects and events sustained inher- incontrollable), the second one is the supernatural realm,
ent relations (i.e., order). Language, therefore, turns primor- which once it enters the picture, it gives sense to everything
dial to symbolize the world (Lacan, 2008), and hence, it is else in the natural realm. In short, the conventional type of
through “a communicative set of interactions” that “social symbolic orders that humans have constructed is one that
and cultural beliefs and understandings are shaped and circu- emerges through rifts, such as the rift between the natural
lated” (Freeden, 2003, p. 103). Symbolizing the world, and and the supernatural.
imagining fictitious relationships among its entities, has his- Nonetheless, humans have found other ways to fantasize
torically allowed humans to order themselves at a social without requiring a rift. These other ways involve what I call
level, as within a symbolic order, the existence of a human magical realism fantasizing. Magical realism is a term first
being is no longer undetermined but, by contrast, an imagi- coined by art critique Franz Roh (1995), who used it to
nary hailing is given to every person (Althusser, 2006), as to describe in art the juxtaposition of realism—aiming at depict-
bestow on them a place in the world. In short, the symbolic ing the world as closely as it is—and magic—aiming at depict-
order is the greatest fantasy that humans have built in their ing the world not necessarily as it is but as we imagine and/or
desperate attempts to pretend that everything in the world wish it to be. Here, as Bowers (2004) argues, magic relates to
makes sense for itself. However, the tragedy of the fantasy of “any extraordinary occurrence and particularly to anything
the symbolic order is that, far from setting us free from our spiritual or unaccountable by rational science” (p. 19). Magical
misery, it makes us slaves anew. Because in the fantasy of the realism eventually evolved into a widely spread and success-
symbolic order, as Clegg (2010) argues, implicit violence ful literary genre, where, as Flores (1955) argues, “the novelty
emerges through “social actors acquiescing in their own . . . consisted in the amalgamation of reality and fantasy” (p.
domination” (p. 6). 189). Considered originally the voice of the Latin American
In sum, within the symbolic, our subjection expands, novel (see, for example, García Márquez’s, 2014, masterpiece
because now the subject is that who is not only subjected to One Hundred Years of Solitude), magical realism has become
nature, but “at the same time . . . subjected to the meanings a global phenomenon, which encompasses any effort to