Desiring walls

Abstract

This fragment is part of a book that tries to offer theoretical insights that may allow us to explain the proliferation of international walls over the last decades. It describes one of the contradictions of liberal globalisation (a process of global integration provoked by the free movement of capital, goods and people), arguing that these constructions represent a failed attempt at reversing its effects in order to impose the Nation-states power. This chapter explores possible explanations for why there is a desire for walls in late modernity. In particular, Wendy Brown analyses whether it would be possible to relate this phenomenon to the notions of identity defense developed in the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund and Ana Freud. Brown argues that walls serve to supplement the identity and sovereignty lost by the Nation-state, caused by globalization, in offering visual monuments that hide sovereign powers crisis and reinforce the idea that it can stop globalisation’s effects.