Ontological (in)security after truth: Disinformation as affective technology

Introduction

From viral conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines to state-sponsored campaigns during elections, disinformation has become a defining feature of our lives (Bergmann, 2018; Bessi et al., 2015; Boulianne and Lee, 2022). It infiltrates social media feeds, distorts public discourse, and reshapes political realities (Enders et al., 2023; Freeze et al., 2021). Effectiveness of existing counter-attempts such as debunking is now questionable, prompting academic research towards alternative ways such as prebunking (Lewandowsky and Van Der Linden, 2021). However, this article offers a perspective that focuses on the affective dimension of disinformation instead of the accuracy of its content. For example, despite being debunked repeatedly, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory mobilised thousands because it resonated with them, felt right, and offered a narrative of moral clarity and agency in a world perceived as chaotic (Bleakley, 2023). This paradox – why demonstrably false narratives resonate so powerfully – underscores the stakes of this discussion. Disinformation can unsettle who we are, our subjectivities, and our relations to ‘the other(s)’ and to the world. However, at the same time, ironically, disinformation can also offer new ways of producing the subject, a promise of enjoyment, however distorted it may be. This is not unique to disinformation. Accurate narratives can mobilise emotions. What makes disinformation distinctive is its reliance on affective plausibility rather than epistemic accuracy.

The article begins from the premise that disinformation is not only a problem of truth, but also of (in)security – specifically, ontological (in)security. Ontological security in International Relations (IR) conventionally refers to the sense of continuity, coherence, and stability that individuals and collectives rely on to function in the world. It is about having a sense of who one is and what one stands for. When this sense of self is destabilised – by trauma or political upheaval – individuals and collectives experience what IR scholars call ontological insecurity: a deep, often disorienting existential anxiety about their sense of self and place in the world (Kinnvall, 2004; Mitzen, 2006; Steele, 2008). However, here lies the theoretical puzzle for OSS: how can a kind of information with falsehoods and inaccuracies feel right for many, offering emotionally satisfying explanations and a sense of coherence and completeness in times of ambiguity and change? The puzzle demands a conceptual framework of ontological (in)security that can account for disinformation’s affective power. This article argues that to engage with this tension, OSS must take emotions seriously as not by-products of disinformation but the very mechanisms through which disinformation does its political work through producing individual and collective subjects.

Despite growing recognition of disinformation as an affective phenomenon (see section ‘Disinformation and Emotions’), Ontological Security Studies (OSS) has yet to fully theorise how disinformation interacts with existential anxiety and operates through emotions. Much of the existing literature focuses on narrative coherence, trust, or identity continuity, often treating emotions as derivative (for exceptions, see Innes, 2017; Kinnvall, 2016, 2018; Solomon, 2018). The growing existentialist and psychoanalytical approaches overwhelmingly focus on anxiety and affective moods (Gellwitzki, 2022; Rumelili, 2023). This article challenges both. Drawing on affect theory, Lacan’s theory of subject, and media and communication studies, it proposes a conceptual move that understands disinformation as an affective technology (Lasén, 2009): an apparatus that channels existential anxiety to the symbolic realm through emotional representations. Emotions, represented in contingent discursive contexts (in Lacan’s terminology, the symbolic order of the subject), frame how we see the world, relate to others, and understand ourselves. In the context of disinformation, they construct new political imaginaries, produce subjectivities, and reconfigure identity boundaries, giving rise to ‘affective communities’ (Hutchison, 2016) or ‘affective publics’ (Serrano-Puche, 2021).

This article is a theory-building intervention within OSS that uses disinformation as the primary empirical–conceptual site, and it does not propose a general theory of ontological (in)security in the age of disinformation, though its conceptual devices can be portable beyond disinformation cases. Its contributions are theoretical. The discussion primarily advances OSS and secondarily contributes to research on disinformation. For OSS, it offers a conceptual shift from cognitive–narrative and routine-centred accounts to an emotionally informed framework that goes beyond anxiety itself and sheds light on how anxiety is channelled through emotions in the process of producing the subject vis-à-vis ‘the other’. In doing so, it expands the psychoanalytical strand of OSS beyond existentialist and Kleinian approaches by mobilising a Lacanian account of subjectivity, while integrating emotions as discursive representations that channel affect (anxiety) into symbolic attachments. This reframing helps OSS explain why subjects are drawn to destabilising narratives and how such narratives produce (in)security through emotionally mediated fantasy rather than epistemic accuracy. For disinformation studies, the article imports OSS’s psychoanalytic insights to conceptualise what disinformation does. Disinformative narratives offer illusory coherence and agency via emotions, and thereby explaining the persistence of emotionally resonant falsehoods despite debunking. More broadly, the argument underscores why disinformation must be central to OSS as it has increasingly become a constitutive site where ontological (in)security is produced and managed, making emotions, not truth conditions alone, decisive for contemporary subject formation.

This article unfolds through a four-part structure that collectively advances OSS by integrating insights from disinformation and emotion research across social sciences. Based on the developing field in media and communication studies, it begins by establishing the rationale for examining disinformation in relation to emotions, arguing that emotional dynamics are central to how disinformation circulates and resonates. After making the case, the second section argues that Lacanian ontological (in)security framework with its focus on symbolic order and the subject’s pursuit of enjoyment (jouissance) is best suited to conceptualise emotions in OSS. The third section turns to existing discussions of disinformation within OSS, highlighting the relative neglect of emotions and introducing emotions as a critical, most acknowledged yet undertheorised, dimension through a Lacan-informed OS framework built in the previous section. This is the article’s core theoretical intervention that disinformation functions as an affective technology, emotionally reconfiguring the Self-Other binaries and offer an illusory sense of complete Self to the subject’s existential anxiety. The article concludes by briefly illustrating the framework in the case of ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory. It shows how the conspiracy produces the subject away from the detested other (racialised and minoritised groups, the elite, the establishment, Democrats) and towards the desired other (white hegemonic and homogeneous ‘people’).

Two caveats are in order. From an ontological security perspective, disinformation should not be understood through the binary of truth versus falsehood. Its power lies less in epistemic accuracy and more in its capacity to operate as myth and, in Kurowska’s (2024) terms, as a producer of ‘sacred truths’ within and through epistemic schemes. Myths, as Kirke and Steele (2023) argue, are not evaluated by their truth content but by what they do: they provide significance, coherence, and a sense of certainty in the face of existential ambiguity. Similarly, sacred truths embedded in epistemic practices function performatively. They are enacted and ritualised to generate a sense of redemptive hegemony, not to withstand empirical scrutiny (Kurowska, 2024). Whether individuals believe disinformation to be factually correct is therefore secondary. What matters is its role in mediating anxiety and offering meaning through authoritative narratives (in Lacan’s term, fantasies) that feel incontestable, normal, and legitimate. Myths and sacred truths act as ‘lenses’ that filter reality, transforming overwhelming complexity into simplified, dramatic narratives and in doing so, they can consolidate familiar identity imaginaries or displace them by scripting new antagonisms. Disinformation performs this same work by generating emotionally charged stories that promise jouissance and agency, sustaining their appeal through repetition and variation – the ‘work on myth’ (Kirke and Steele, 2023: 912) Crucially, emotions are the mechanisms through which these myths and sacred truths resonate. Fear, pride, and resentment orient subjects towards desired others and away from detested others. In this sense, disinformation is best understood as an affective technology that, so to speak, mythologises (international) politics. ¹

A second caveat concerns the conceptual boundaries of disinformation and its relationship to identity. This article does not claim that the affective dynamics it theorises are exclusive to disinformation. Other narratives, including those grounded in epistemic accuracy, can also mobilise emotions and promise Lacanian completeness. What distinguishes disinformation is not its falsity per se, nor the subject’s awareness of that falsity, but its systematic reliance on affective plausibility rather than accuracy as its primary mode of resonance. Disinformation inserts itself into the symbolic order by converting existential anxiety into emotional representations that feel incontestable, even when they lack empirical grounding. In many cases, it works because it resonates with pre-existing symbolic attachments, thereby reinforcing familiar identity positions. However, its capacity to reconfigure identities lies in how it reorders these attachments – intensifying some, displacing others, and scripting new antagonisms – rather than solely affirming what is already there. As will be discussed in relation to the Great Replacement Theory, this reordering often involves amplifying certain master signifiers (e.g. ‘the people’, ‘the elite’) while introducing new ones (e.g. ‘replacement’, ‘invasion’), which redraw boundaries of belonging and exclusion. In other words, while disinformation often resonates because it draws on existing signifiers in the symbolic, its political effectiveness lies in how it amplifies, displaces, and rearticulates these signifiers, producing new boundaries of belonging and exclusion.

Disinformation and emotions

This first section discusses why emotions should be taken seriously with regard to disinformation and prepares the rationale for OSS to take this task onboard. The intersection of disinformation and emotions has emerged as a critical area of inquiry within media and communication studies and affective dynamics are central to the production, circulation, and reception of disinformation. Rather than treating disinformation as a purely epistemological or cognitive problem, recent scholarship explores the emotional mechanisms through which it operates, revealing how affect shapes belief, identity, and consequently, political behaviour. Such mechanisms are not exclusive to disinformation – truthful narratives also engage emotions – but disinformation foregrounds affective resonance as its primary mode of appeal.

In communication/media studies, there has been growing interest in the intersections of emotions and how the audience receives, perceives, and engages with news (Beckett and Deuze, 2016; Madianou, 2009) and disinformation has now been under analytical scrutiny. The susceptibility to disinformation is deeply entangled with emotional processing, challenging the assumption that belief formation is primarily a rational or deliberative act. Martel et al. (2020: 5) demonstrate that individuals who rely on emotion are significantly more likely to accept false information, as emotionally provocative content tends to trigger intuitive, rather than reflective, responses. This supports a ‘dual-process model’ in which affective cues override epistemic scrutiny (Martel et al., 2020: 15). Kormelink and Meijer (2017) reinforce this by arguing that emotions play a role in decisions to click on some digital contents and not others. These insights suggest that susceptibility to ‘fake news’ is more than a failure of logic but a function of emotional resonance, particularly in contexts of uncertainty and risk.

Disinformation also operates as a mechanism of political polarisation by mobilising emotions that reconfigure collective identities and allegiances. It can be conceptualised as a strategic tool that exploits emotions, especially fear, anger, and nostalgia, to erode institutional trust and delegitimise alternative narratives (Manfredi et al., 2022). ‘The leveraging of emotions is more profitable in open societies, whose internal controversies are employed to exacerbate polarisation’ (Manfredi et al., 2022: 215). In particular, digital platforms are structurally designed to amplify emotionally provocative content, giving rise to ‘affective publics’ – communities bound by shared emotional responses rather than shared facts (Serrano-Puche, 2021). These affective publics intensify polarisation by reinforcing emotional echo chambers, thereby producing repeated affirmation of existing misogynistic, xenophobic and racist beliefs and ideas as a structural outcome of communication (Chadwick, 2019).

The emotional state of recipients plays a decisive role in shaping how disinformation is interpreted and internalised. For example, both prior affective states of recipients of disinformation and emotional responses to content significantly influence susceptibility to such information (Lühring et al., 2024). Individuals experiencing heightened emotional arousal – such as anger – are more likely to accept false information and less likely to engage in critical evaluation. Moreover, emotional responses are often mediated by social identity, with individuals more inclined to believe emotionally resonant disinformation that aligns with their group affiliations, which is in line with the ‘affective public’ concept above. This dynamic impairs epistemic accuracy while it also reinforces in-group versus out-group dichotomy by deepening affective divisions and entrenching binary constructions of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and therefore, feeds into polarisation discussed above.

These contemporary perspectives from media and communication studies suggest that OSS must take emotions seriously as constitutive forces in the formation of subjectivity and in analysing existential anxiety. It is correct that disinformation operates by disrupting narrative coherence. However, it is also important to conceptualise disinformation through its function of mobilising affective processes that shape how individuals come to know themselves and others. This inevitably raises critical questions for OSS: How does disinformation mediate the subject’s sense of continuity, coherence, and agency? In what ways do emotionally charged narratives with disinformative content reconfigure the boundaries of identity and belonging? And how might ontological (in)security itself be understood as an affective condition, produced and sustained through emotional attachments to particular ‘truths’ while completely overlooking others?

Engaging with these questions requires OSS to move beyond a cognitive model of the Self, which is typically anchored in Giddensian notions of routinised practices and identity continuity. Instead, critical attention must be given to the affective processes through which disinformation shapes subjectivity. This shift opens space for approaches, such as those informed by psychoanalysis, that examine how emotions are central to myriad ways in which disinformation operates. As will be discussed below, they shape the affective conditions under which individuals experience themselves, relate to others, and interpret the world around them. Understanding this emotional dimension is essential for grasping how ontological (in)security is produced, sustained, and disrupted. The next section will first briefly explain the concept of ontological (in)security and then discuss how the existing scholarship explores the relationship between ontological (in)security and disinformation.

Ontological (in)security: a concept

The concept of ontological security was first introduced by the psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1960), who explored the existential experiences of individuals suffering from schizophrenia. For Laing, ontological security referred to a person’s fundamental sense of being real, whole, and continuous over time. He described the ontologically secure individual as someone who possesses ‘a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person’ (1960: 37). This secure sense of self enables individuals to engage with the world without being overwhelmed by existential anxieties such as engulfment, implosion, or petrification – experiences that Laing associated with ontological insecurity.

Building upon Laing’s insights, Giddens (1991: 92) reinterpreted as the ‘confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action’. For Giddens, ontological security is embedded in the routinised practices of everyday life. These routines, such as daily habits, social interactions, or institutional engagements – serve to stabilise one’s identity by providing a predictable and coherent framework through which individuals interpret their experiences. The stability of identity, therefore, is both a matter of internal coherence and of external consistency in one’s environment. This dual anchoring in both psychological and sociological domains makes the concept valuable for analysing how individuals and collectives navigate existential uncertainty.

In IR, ontological security is traditionally conceptualised as the security of the self through the use of narratives and routinised practices (Mitzen, 2006; Steele, 2008). As Mitzen (2006: 344) articulates, it refers to ‘security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice’ (see also, Agius, 2016). This notion is echoed by Shani (2017: 277), who describes it as the ‘psychological security of the self’, and by Della Sala (2017: 547), who frames it as ‘confidence in one’s identity’. Gustafsson (2014: 71) similarly refers to it as the ‘security of identity’. Over time, OSS has expanded its theoretical and methodological scope. It has been employed as a lens through which to interpret the persistence of certain international conflicts and to make sense of foreign policy decisions that appear irrational or counterproductive when assessed purely in terms of material interests (Cash, 2017; Ejdus, 2020). Further discussions have centred on the conceptualisation of identity within OSS, particularly regarding ontological (in)security should not be treated as a fixed state but as an ongoing process of becoming (Kinnvall, 2018), which resonates with the psychoanalytical and existentialist approaches, which will be next.

As OSS has grown in prominence and analytical breadth, it has also attracted a range of criticisms, both from within the OSS community and from scholars outside of it, regarding its relevance and applicability to state behaviour and international politics more broadly (Croft, 2012; Lebow, 2016). Critiques have raised concerns about ‘the pro-status-quo bias’ of the framework and its capacity to account for change and transformation in the way that subjectivities and identities are discussed in politics (Browning and Joenniemi, 2017; Rossdale, 2015). Partly to respond to these criticisms, the OS scholars have begun to pay more analytical attention to change and their main conceptual tool to address is through the framework’s core affective foundation: anxiety.

OSS in IR initially conceptualised anxiety (primarily, of states) as a problem that needs to be addressed through going back to routines and/or restabilising the identity narratives. This understanding has dominated the sociological approaches in OSS and become even an unquestioned foundation of the field (Gellwitzki, 2025: 120). As part of the efforts to develop a more nuanced understanding of anxiety, Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi (2020) suggest ‘returning to the origins’ of OS and based on Laing’s original work, they differentiate ‘normal anxiety’ from ‘neurotic anxiety’, which is existential and reason of ontological insecurity (see also Krickel-Choi, 2022). However, the analytical utility of such differentiation has been questioned as the line between the two is more blurred in practice than the analytical framework assumes (Kirke and Steele, 2023: 915). Furthermore, psychoanalytical approaches have discussed and studied anxiety as an existential condition, which raises the question as to what makes anxiety ‘neurotic’ (Houde, 2024: 6).

An alternative approach to anxiety, which is more useful for the purposes of this article, has been developed. Instead of categorising anxiety, this approach focuses on how anxiety is tackled by either attempting to return to the imagined identity stability or embracing ambivalence and change (Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2020). The existentialist approach in OSS highlights the productive potential of anxiety that opens new possibilities for the subject to exist in a complex world full of uncertainty (Arfi, 2020; Rumelili, 2015, 2021; Rumelili and Celik, 2017; Sharani and Celik, 2024). Similarly, the psychoanalytical approach derived from Melanie Klein’s work focuses on the question of how anxiety is managed either through adopting the paranoid-schizoid position or depressive position. While the former suggests the separation of the Self as good and the other as bad (persistent ontological insecurity), the latter blurs these boundaries and lead to a life that accepts complexity and ambivalence, hence, ontological security (Gellwitzki, 2025, see also Cash, 2020; Gellwitzki and Houde, 2023; Houde, 2024).

The existentialist and Kleinian psychoanalysis approaches in OSS have effectively challenged the sociological approach that assumes and promotes stability and routines by unpacking the productive potential of uncertainty and instability but more importantly by showing the subject does not necessarily fall into chaos when anxiety arises but develop alternative mechanisms to address anxiety (e.g. Houde, 2024). This is a key point to understand the disinformation-ontological (in)security nexus. Disinformation does not necessarily and automatically mean chaos for the subject because it destabilises the Self and prompt attempts to reconstruct the Self through routines, as the sociological approaches might assume). The more interesting and relevant question is how disinformation is involved in the subject’s way of dealing with existential anxiety and how this engagement can lead to change in the way that the subject is produced. This article will answer this question by establishing a conceptual link between anxiety and disinformation through emotions. However, the Kleinian approach does not sufficiently explore or conceptualise the role of discourse and social norms where both emotions are represented and disinformation circulates (for this critique see, McIvor, 2016). That’s why the discussion will now turn to other main psychoanalytic approach in OSS: Lacanian ontological (in)security framework.

Jacque Lacan’s theory of subject paves an effective way of studying emotions in OSS and how disinformation can be studied within this framework. For Lacan, one only becomes a subject through their relationship with, and in comparison with, others. Central to this process is the concept of ‘the other’, which appears in multiple forms. The ‘other’, with a lowercase ‘o’, refers to other people who are recognisably distinct from ‘the Self’. More crucially, Lacan introduces ‘the Other’ with a capital ‘O’, which represents the broader symbolic structures – such as language, law, institutions, and traditions – into which one is born. They are discursive contexts the subject has to engage with to being a subject. In this relational process, the subject becomes aware of its constitutive lack: a core that the subject has lost when it begun to interact with the Other. This prompts a never-ending pursuit of narratives that promises jouissance. Through this process, individuals adopt ‘master signifiers’ from the symbolic – key cultural and ideological terms – that give the illusion of a complete Self. For instance, Solomon (2015) illustrates how, in post-9/11 America, political discourse constructed a particular notion of ‘the American’ as an idealised subject, not based on empirical traits but on symbolic representation. Similarly, Burgess (2017) argues that the Other functions as a normative force, shaping both idealised and detested others (small o), while remaining irreducible to any specific person or group. This symbolic framework defines what is considered acceptable, desirable, or normal. While the subject’s pursuit of wholeness through these signifiers is ultimately futile (that is why Lacan calls completeness fantasy), the desire to achieve completeness or the pursuit of jouissance never ends.

What drives this process unconsciously is anxiety. Lacan conceptualises anxiety not as an emotion but as an affect intrinsically linked to the psychoanalytic notion of objet petit a – the elusive, unsettling, and fundamentally unattainable object of desire (Burgess, 2017: 29). Unlike representational objects, objet petit a resists symbolisation and remains structurally absent, yet it plays a constitutive role in the formation of the subject. From a Lacanian perspective, anxiety emerges as a structural condition of subjectivity itself, rooted in the subject’s perpetual pursuit of wholeness through the unattainable objet petit a (Zevnik, 2021: 1052). This pursuit is embedded within the symbolic order (the Other) – the discursive and normative structures that pre-exist and shape the subject. As Zevnik (2017: 629) argues, anxiety is inescapable precisely because it arises through the subject’s identification with this symbolic order (the Other), which mediates meaning, identity, and social comparison (see also Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008: 261). Thus, anxiety is not a pathological deviation from normalcy (problematising the separation between ‘normal’ and ‘neurotic’) but an affect that reflects the subject’s entanglement with symbolic order and discursive representations that constitute it (differing from the existentialist and Kleinian approaches through its focus on the symbolic).

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article contends that anxiety emerges as an affective state intrinsic to the process of becoming a subject which points at a perpetual negotiation of subjectivity. Ontological security, therefore, is not a static achievement (i.e. a Giddensian re-stabilisation of identity) but a dynamic, albeit impossible, desire of a ‘complete Self’ (Bilgic and Pilcher, 2022; Eberle, 2019; Vieira, 2018). Within this framework, the subject is unconsciously compelled to seek a coherent, complete, ‘Self’ through adopting fantasy narratives in the symbolic, or ‘the Other’ in Lacan’s terminology. Thus, for OSS underpinned by Lacan’s psychoanalytical approach, the question is not how disinformation generates ontological insecurity through disrupting identity narratives. The pressing question is how disinformative fantasy narratives channels anxiety as a productive force in the formation of subjectivity.

To fully grasp this dynamic, as will be elaborated in the following section, it is essential to make a theoretical move towards the role of emotions in the disinformation–ontological security nexus. According to Lacan, emotions’ ‘meaning and significance is a function not of their intrinsic properties; but rather of the subject’s universe of meaning and the way that fantasy structures it’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008: 267). Emotions such as fear or hate are the discursive representations of existential anxiety (affect) of the subject facing the symbolic order. While anxiety as an affect is the unconscious driver of ‘becoming’, emotions named fear, resentment or hope, serve as its discursive representations, shaping how subjects respond to the symbolic.

Disinformation, in this context, does not simply distort facts or manipulate truth; it also engages directly with the fantasy narratives of completeness. Other narratives, including empirically accurate ones, can similarly promise completeness through fantasy structures. What differentiates disinformation is that its affective plausibility compensates for the absence of epistemic grounding. It involves with the subject’s desire for a coherent Self, offering jouissance. These narratives construct desirable ‘others’ that the subject aims to become and ‘others’ as the objects of subject’s negative emotions. This construction can intensify pre-existing identity markers or introduce new ones, thereby reconfiguring symbolic attachments. These emotions named as fear, hate, anger, and resentment by the subject only makes sense in the discursive context, the symbolic order. For example, in the populist fantasy narratives, ‘the people’ is constructed as the desired other while ‘the elite’ is the detestable one that prevent the subject from achieving completeness (Kinnvall and Svensson, 2022). What is identified as ‘anger’ towards the elite is a discursive representation of existential anxiety in the symbolic and the object of anger (the elite) is constructed as the obstacle to the subject’s completeness, jouissance.

Similarly, disinformative fantasy narrative such as the racist alt-right conspiracy ‘Great Replacement Theory’ (see section 4) makes the ontological lack of the subject an empirical lack by promising a complete Self with detestable others. These others such as immigrants or the elite are constructed as the objects of negative emotions (empirical manifestations of existential anxiety in the symbolic) and the desired other is constructed as the white hegemonic society (Feola, 2024, chapter 5; Sedgwick, 2024). In this sense, emotions are not results or by-products of ontological (in)security-disinformation nexus: they are its operational mechanisms. The nexus cannot exist without the boundary producing work that emotions do. The psychoanalytical lens illuminates how disinformation does not only ‘threaten’ ontological security but actively participates in its production by providing the subjects with the promise of enjoyment, jouissance, with its hated, fearsome, detested others. If OSS moves beyond cognitive and narrative identity stabilisation frameworks to incorporate a more nuanced understanding of affect and emotion, it then becomes possible to theorise disinformation not only as a political or epistemic challenge but as a deeply affective phenomenon.

Ontological (in)security in the age of disinformation

As global politics becomes increasingly shaped by (dis)information flows, scholars have begun to explore the explanatory potential of ontological security with regard to the proliferation of disinformation and its strategic manipulation. This emerging body examines how information warfare (IW) and conspiracy theories destabilise the ontological foundations of both individuals and collectives. The following section engages with this literature, highlighting how disinformation operates as a cognitive or epistemic threat as well as a challenge to the subject’ sense of the ‘the Self’. Ironically, at the same time, it can also offer, for some, a possibility of re-stabilisation or, according to this article, a ‘fantasy’ of completeness in Lacan’s terminology.

First, IW has been studied as a deliberate and covert strategy to manipulate the subjective sense of identity and continuity that underpins both individual and collective security. Drawing on Giddens’ notion that ontological security is sustained through routinised practices and trust in the continuity of one’s environment, Bolton (2021) argues that IW disrupts these stabilising mechanisms by distorting the information landscape. This distortion, he explains, can either influence policy by making certain actions appear incongruent with national identity and thus shameful, or it can more radically destabilise the social fabric by polarising internal debates and eroding the coherence of national narratives. In the context of 2016 U.S. presidential election, he demonstrates how Russian IW exploited existing societal divisions, using disinformation and social media manipulation to exacerbate partisan tensions and foster a sense of existential anxiety among the American populace (see also, Gerrits, 2019). This, he argues, was a calculated effort to induce ontological insecurity as a strategic end in itself. This analysis is crucial to understand the process in which ontological insecurity is articulated as a warfare objective but underpinned by the sociological approach which essentially connects disinformation and instability. An existentialist approach, however, might point at a more complicated picture.

Moving away from the Giddensian approach, Chiasson (2021), while aligned with Bolton in identifying OS as the primary target of IW, offers a nuanced account of how IW operates. He introduces the concepts of meaningfulness and meaninglessness as the fundamental levers through which IW transitions the subject between states of ontological security and insecurity and back, highlighting the dual role disinformation has. Based on Laing’s insights, Chiasson argues that IW functions by dismantling existing frameworks of meaning and replacing them with illusory narratives that offer a deceptive sense of purpose and identity, or a complete Self in Lacan’s terminology. This process, he suggests, is particularly potent during periods of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when individuals’ habitual routines and belief systems are disrupted. In such moments, the search for meaning becomes acute, and IW exploits this vulnerability by offering alternative narratives – often in the form of conspiracy theories – that provide a sense of agency, mission, and belonging. Chiasson’s analysis of disinformation in Canada during the pandemic illustrates how these narratives can reorient individuals’ perceptions of threat and identity, shifting blame from the virus to governmental institutions and thereby fostering a new, albeit illusory, sense of ontological security (Chiasson, 2021). Importantly, Chiasson expands the theoretical scope of OS by incorporating existentialist philosophy, particularly the works of Heidegger and Nietzsche, to argue that the human condition is inherently marked by a tension between the desire for stable meaning and the inevitability of existential anxiety. IW, in this view, manipulates this existential tension by offering a false path to authenticity that appears to resolve the question of existential anxiety. His focus on the dynamics of meaning-making and the role of illusory narratives, which is in line with the OS approach this article adopts, in shaping perceptions of (in)security offers a deeper understanding of why individuals are susceptible to IW and how such operations achieve their effects.

These works, one underlined by the sociological and one by the existentialist philosophy, underscore the dual function of disinformation. On the one hand, it destabilises narratives, disrupts routines, and erodes trust (due to its epistemic effect); on the other hand, it constructs alternative narratives that can feel more coherent and even empowering to the subjects. From the Kleinian perspective, it might be argued that disinformation reinforces the paranoid-schizoid position by constructing ‘the good Self’ versus ‘the bad other’ binaries. Despite these advances about what disinformation does and with what purpose, there is a theoretical gap this article aims to address: how exactly does disinformation operate?

A critical gap in the existing literature on OS-disinformation nexus lies in the under-theorisation of the emotional dimensions of ontological (in)security. Insights from media and communication studies (section 1) show that disinformation evokes and manipulates powerful emotions that are intimately tied to individuals’ subjectivities. These emotions are constitutive of the disruption that disinformation, when strategically used as discussed above, seeks to achieve. While disinformation can generate anxiety by presenting exaggerated or fabricated threats (Lee et al., 2024) and/or generating ‘moral panic’ (Carlson, 2020), it has not theoretically accounted for how exactly this anxiety can be channelled to the discursive realm and with what political consequences. Nor has it sufficiently examined how disinformation narratives offer new subjectivities by providing illusory coherence, as discussed above, agency, and even moral clarity. This article addresses this gap by arguing that disinformation works through emotional representations in the discursive realm, which becomes the symbolic (or the Other) for the subject. With its desired and detested others, it promises a fantasy of ‘complete Self’. In doing so, it contributes a novel perspective to the field: that the power of disinformation lies not in its informational content, but in its capacity to function through emotions in the subject production process. In other words, disinformation can be treated as the Other, the symbolic order, where the subject seek fantasy narratives of completeness to tackle its lack. Disinformation can give an empirical meaning to objet petit a and it does this through emotions as discursive representations in the symbolic order. Next, it will be discussed how emotions have been studied in OSS with the objective of developing a Lacanian take on emotions in OSS.

Ontological security is ‘a call to investigate cognitive and affective reasons why individuals, groups and even states experience insecurity and existential anxiety and to explore the emotional responses to these feelings’ (Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2016: 5). Emotions have been central to OSS, although, as discussed above, it is frequently discussed in relation to anxiety, which is not an emotion for Lacanian OS. However, there are exceptions, and this article advances the existing theorisation of emotions in OSS. Kinnvall, (2016, 2018) foregrounds emotions as intersubjective forces embedded in myths and memories, while Kinnvall and Mitzen (2020) emphasise fear and anxiety as key mechanisms – fear driving securitisation and closure, anxiety enabling both retrenchment and transformation. Innes (2017) extends this analysis to the everyday, illustrating how affect circulates through popular culture, and Skonieczny (2018) demonstrates how emotional narratives underpin populist imaginaries. These studies share a tendency to treat emotions as instruments for managing existential anxiety and restoring coherence. The approach in this article advances this scholarship by reconfiguring emotions as discursive representations of existential anxiety within the symbolic order that push the subject towards desired others and pulls it away from the detested others through fantasy narratives.

In addition, recent scholarship also underscores the significance of moods as ambient, lingering orientations that shape how worlds appear and how bodies become attuned to one another (Gellwitzki, 2022; Resende et al., 2023; Rumelili, 2023; Solomon, 2018, see also Solomon, 2023 for the concept of ‘ritualistic atmospheres’). Moods operate as affective atmospheres – ’the how of what appears’ – that condition openness to certain possibilities and exclusions of others (Ahmed, 2014a: 14). They matter politically because they create the background against which national belonging and collective imaginaries are negotiated, often through mood work that aligns bodies with dominant rhythms (Ahmed, 2014a: 22). Yet, while moods structure the affective atmospheres (Solomon, 2023), emotions, as will be discussed below, are more decisive for disinformation’s political efficiency. Unlike moods, emotions are explicitly object-oriented. They can attach to specific figures and convert diffuse unease into actionable antagonism. Disinformation projects existential anxiety onto tangible others via emotions. Populist narratives about immigration or COVID-19 conspiracies exemplify this. They generate moralised binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’, offering clarity and agency amid uncertainty (Kinnvall, 2018). Thus, while OSS must engage with moods, the durability and mobilising force of disinformation lies in its emotional infrastructures, which direct affect (i.e. anxiety) towards concrete objects.

There is, however, an additional analytical and, to a certain extent, normative problem with studies exclusively focusing on moods in OSS. For example, in her insightful conceptualisation of ‘fundamental uncertainty’ based on Heidegger’s moods of anxiety and fear, Rumelili (2023) argues that, in the case of 9/11, the mood of anxiety immediately appeared after the unprecedented terrorist attacks and quickly turned into the mood of fear, characterised by a clear target and objectives aimed at its elimination. Similarly, Gellwitzki (2022) discusses the euphoric public mood following the border opening, which reconstructed the welcoming German identity in 2015–16. The potential problem with this approach is that the mood in question exists only cognitively and affectively, depending on the subject’s position within the discursive realm. It is analytically questionable whether a Muslim in post-9/11 USA or a racist, xenophobic German national after the border opening would even experience these moods. Beyond the normative issues of generalising moods, this analytical approach overlooks that mood is inherently subject-dependent. In other words, mood derives from how the subject relates to the discursive realm. This is why Lacanian subject theory, along with emotions as discursive representations in the symbolic, provides the basis for this article’s discussion. Although this may be criticised as subject-centrism (Gellwitzki, 2022: 1105), it offers a means of analysing the symbolic without reverting to structural generalisations.

These contributions are important to conceptualise emotions as conditions that influence ontological security-seeking, yet Lacanian OS can offer a framework that foregrounds emotions as a constitutive dimension of subject production process in the symbolic order. Following the Lacanian approach to OS, anxiety can be conceptualised not as an emotion, differing from the vast part of existing OSS, but as an affect. As such, anxiety exists beyond the reach of discourse and it does not have any empirical substance in itself. When the subject enters lalangue (the language), the primary affect is objet petit a, pre-discursive loss or lack (Soler, 2016: 53), which prompts the subject to recover the loss through narratives that promise completeness. Emotions are discursive representations of this affect (anxiety), empirical manifestations of ontological lack, in lalangue. As will be discussed with reference emotions studies below, emotions push the subject towards the desired other and away from the detested other through fantasy narratives of completeness (Bilgic, 2024).

Representations are inherently political (Stokke and Selboe, 2009; Van der Ree, 2013). They do not merely reflect reality but actively construct it, shaping how entities such as the nation are imagined and understood in ways that reinforce or contest existing power relations. Hutchison (2016: 19) argues that emotions as discursive representations are ‘embedded’ within the social and cultural frameworks through which we interpret the world. Through representations, emotions can be ‘embodied, enacted, transmitted and interpreted’ in ways that generate specific sociocultural meanings, values, and beliefs. This perspective claims that representations do not provide direct access to the ‘truth’ of emotional experience. Rather, it posits that representations play a constitutive role in shaping how emotions (what is being discursively constructed as fear, love, or hate) are felt, understood, and mobilised by individuals and collectives. Crucially, Hutchison (2016) asserts that ‘emotions – the ways we feel and why we do so in the circumstances we do – are inevitably shaped by dominant political discourses and the entrenched interests that are associated with them’.

Regarding emotions and affects, while conceptually distinct but inseparable in practice – ’like egg and yolk’ (210), Ahmed (2014b) proposes using ‘emotion’ as an organising concept to explore how individuals are affected in diverse ways and how these affective responses become collectively intelligible (Ahmed, 2014b: 208). Emotions, in her view, are instrumental in redrawing the boundaries of identity by orienting subjects either towards or away from particular objects of emotion (Ahmed, 2014b: 216). These orientations are socially, culturally, and historically constructed. Emotional representations are thus pivotal in constructing the figure of the ‘other’. This ‘other’ is not only different but is often positioned as the object of the subject’s emotions, whether that be fear, disdain, or hate. In this way, emotions actively participate in the formation of subjectivity, which always need to be negotiated (Browning and Joenniemi, 2017: 42).

The approach above is aligned with Lacan’s theory of subject. When the subject enters discursive realm through language, emotions in the symbolic order are the key discursive tools that can empirically represent anxiety as affect stemming from objet petit a. As such, emotional representations of how the other(s) in the symbolic order is depicted and felt about are central to the operation of disinformation. For example, disinformation that portrays a national government as ‘the elite’ that is corrupt or malevolent challenges the legitimacy of that institution by producing the subject as opposed to the detestable ‘elite’. The object of the subject’s negative emotions is represented as the main obstacle to the subject’s completeness, jouissance. The solution of disinformative fantasy narrative is to be the desired other such as ‘the people’ that is represented as authentic, real, but permanently oppressed. These affective dynamics are central to the production of ontological (in)security. But how can we theorise disinformation in OSS that reflect these affective dynamics?

A particularly fruitful avenue lies in the integration of Lacanian psychoanalysis with the concept of affective technologies, as introduced by Lasén (2009), which enables a deeper understanding of how disinformation operates within the symbolic order to channel anxiety into the symbolic and reconfigure the subject’s pursuit of completeness. Affective technologies are active mediators of emotional life. Lasén (2009: 227) conceptualises these technologies as ‘technologies of the self’, embedded in the affective practices of everyday existence. They facilitate emotional labour, and structure emotional expression through culturally coded practices or, in the digital sphere, interfaces such as emojis, reaction buttons, and curated content (Paasonen, 2015). Affective technologies (re)configure emotional states within the symbolic order, shaping how subjects relate to themselves and to others. In Lacanian terms, affective technologies can participate in the production of the subject through their mediation of the symbolic, offering fantasy narratives that promise completeness and coherence – however illusory and distorted.

This insight is crucial for understanding the political function of disinformation in relation to existential anxiety. Disinformation operates as an affective technology that engages directly with the subject’s unconscious desire for completeness. As the subject enters the language in the symbolic order (the Other of the subject), it generates anxiety as the subject is affected by lack, loss of objet petit a. It then directs it towards desired others and against detestable others via emotions (e.g. immigrants as the object of hate or the people as the object of love). Finally, disinformation addresses anxiety by offering fantasy narratives of completeness in the symbolic order. In other words, it channels anxiety into the symbolic via discursive representations such as fear, pride, and resentment. This orients the subject towards desired others and away from detested ones. These emotional orientations, as Ahmed (2014b) argues, redraw the boundaries of identity and belonging. In Lacanian terms, disinformation inserts itself into the symbolic order as a source of master signifiers – ideological constructs that promise a coherent Self while masking the impossibility of such completeness. The subject’s pursuit of wholeness, driven by the unattainable objet petit a, is addressed through these emotionally charged narratives, which simultaneously stabilise and destabilise the Self.

While the subject is always in search of completeness and pursues desired others, this does not mean that external shocks can be completely discarded. In moments of crisis, when existing routines and belief systems are destabilised. In such contexts, individuals can be affected by anxiety and seek new sources of completeness through alternative fantasy narratives. Disinformation as affective technology offers not only alternative fantasy narratives but also provide emotionally resonant explanations that make sense of uncertainty and offer a sense of meaning and even agency. This is where emotional representations also become crucial: they actively shape how subjects feel and act. For example, conspiracy theories often rely on emotionally charged imagery and language to construct a coherent worldview in which the subject is both victim and hero (Gendolla, 2024; Wunderlich, 2025). These representations channel anxiety into specific emotional responses – anger at elites, fear of outsiders, pride in national flags – that aim to reinstate the subject’s lack in alignment with the disinformative narrative.

An illustration: great replacement conspiracy as affective technology

As argued in Introduction, disinformation in contemporary politics must be read as myth-work that produces ‘sacred truths’ – claims that feel incontestable and secure identity irrespective of epistemic accuracy (Kirke and Steele, 2023; Kurowska, 2024). Great Replacement Theory (GRT) exemplifies this dynamic: it functions as an affective technology that converts existential anxiety (as affect) originating from the subject’s engagement with the Other (the symbolic order) into discursively legible emotions (fear, resentment, pride), offers fantasy narratives of repair to lack, and reorders symbolic attachments through master signifiers and stark Self/Other binaries. The theory’s appeal, therefore, lies less in its truth value, regardless of what its adherents take it as ‘truth’, than in how it feels right, promising an illusory coherence – a jouissance of recovered wholeness – through emotionally mediated identification.

The ‘Great Replacement’ was popularised by Renaud Camus, rearticulating older nationalist and antisemitic tropes into a consistent set of ideas and action points. In its contemporary form of disinformation, the narrative alleges an elite-orchestrated demographic and cultural replacement of ‘white’ Europeans by racialised and minoritised groups, particularly Muslims (Feola, 2024). Its flexible vocabulary and portability across (mainly digital) platforms facilitated diffusion through far-right networks in Europe and the United States, not primarily because it is empirically robust. Read through a Lacanian lens, GRT instals itself within the symbolic order (the Other) by providing master signifiers that organise perception and action, while objet petit a – the elusive cause of desire – appears to take empirical form in the figure of lost ‘whiteness’ in the face of racialised ‘replacers’ and conspiratorial ‘elites’.

On this view, GRT operates as an affective technology that mobilises desire for jouissance stemming from a complete Self rather than only distorting facts. Fantasy functions by naming an enemy and scripting a plot, converting indeterminate anxiety of the subject into determinate fear, furnishing subjects with an object of threat and a horizon of action to remove the object. Such an object brings together the beatific (completeness with jouissance) and horrific (catastrophic incompleteness) sides of the fantasy (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008: 258). Racialised migrants are the most persistent object of fear in several far-right, GRT-endorsing figures across Europe and USA. For example, Marine Le Pen’s claim that ‘immigration is an organized replacement of our population’ (quoted in Bello, 2020: 392) and Geert Wilders’ warning that ‘Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe’ (Wilders, 2015) exemplify how GRT condenses existential anxiety of the subject into catastrophic imagery (in Lacanian terminology, the horrific side of fantasy). Illustratively, Viktor Orbán declared that migration is ‘population replacement or inundation . . . countries are no longer nations; they are a conglomeration of peoples’ (Orbán, 2022). Orbán’s Tusnádfürdő address exemplifies the horrific side of fantasy recommending Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, thus blending demographic fatalism (‘the West’s inability to defend itself’) with cultural apocalypse (Orbán, 2022). ² Recently, when the UK Conservative Party member of Parliament and former Justice Secretary said he did not see ‘another white face’ during his trip to Birmingham (Aikman and Walker, 2025), he invoked the horrific and catastrophic side of the GRT narrative.

Such discursive moves illustrate the Lacanian ontological (in)security theorised in this article. As the subject engages with the Other (the symbolic order), anxiety is affected and the subject adopts master signifiers from different narratives that promise completeness, and lack manifests in accordance with the narrative adopted. Emotions as discursive representations in the symbolic play the boundary producing work. In the narrative propelled by GRT, anxiety is channelled into the symbolic order through particularly fear and resentment constructing the detested other as its object whose existence prevents the subject from achieving completeness (the beatific side of the fantasy, that is, white supremacy and white homogeneity as jouissance). In other words, a conspiracy theory does engineer an ‘emotional mechanism’ that ‘transform diffuse anxiety into tangible fears’ (Wunderlich, 2025: 6). Fear pushes the subject away from the object (immigrants, ‘the elite’) based on the horrific aspect of the fantasy and pushes towards the idealised, desired other identified in the beatific side of it.

At the level of content, GRT condenses a cluster of master signifiers – ’invasion’, ‘replacement’, ‘native’, ‘white’, ‘the people’, ‘the elites’, ‘globalists’, ‘Democrats’, ‘Brussels’ – that script a binary world of victimised in-group versus malevolent and conspiratorial outgroup (Ekman, 2022; Sedgwick, 2024). Patterns documented by (DiMaggio et al., 2024) in the United States, where agreement with ‘replacement’ claims predicts sympathy for insurrectionary politics, underscore that ressentiment and loss are structured by fantasy narratives that promise repair if the thief of enjoyment (‘the liberal elite’, aka the Democrats) is expelled (see also Wojczewski, 2022). These signifiers orient the subject through emotions: they draw bodies towards desired objects (belonging, purity, whiteness, civilisational continuity) and away from detested ones (immigrants, minoritised groups, cosmopolitan elites, the Democratic Party), thereby redrawing identity boundaries emotionally (Ahmed, 2014b: 216). In Lacanian terms, such signifiers anchor a fantasy that promises jouissance on condition that the obstacle that ‘steals enjoyment’ is named and expelled. The unattainable objet petit a – the structural cause of desire – appears to take empirical form in GRT in figures of demographic loss and cultural dilution.

The mechanism by which GRT functions as an affective technology can be analytically unpacked in the following interlocking moves. First, circulation of disinformation intensifies in moments of disruption, such as disinformation about migration during the Covid-19 pandemic (Butcher and Neidhardt, 2020), when habitual bearings loosen and anxiety, as a structural affect of identification with the symbolic order, becomes salient. In such contexts, GRT provides a totalising narrative that renders complexity legible and danger proximate (e.g. ‘Trojan Horse’). Second, the narrative converts indeterminate anxiety into determinate emotions like fear, anger, resentment by assigning concrete objects and ‘explanatory’ plots to unease (Wunderlich, 2025: 3). The conspiratorial plot against the ‘native’ populations in the West is persistent in GRT. The far-right French politician Éric Zemmour frames his candidacy as a moral crusade ‘to save France from the Great Replacement’ (Zemmour, 2022), while Matteo Salvini asserts an ‘ongoing attempt of ethnic replacement’ (Reynolds, 2019), converting demographic unease into a persecutory plot. In the case of USA, Steve Bannon synthesises a full plot arc (invasion → organisation → electoral theft) when he asserts,

So well thought through in partnership with the cartels, people making tons of money, and having an invasion of this country. Number one to drive down wages among the working poor. Number two, to provide bigger consumer markets for the corporatists. And yes, eventually, to have Democrat votes. All three, a trifecta. So, it’s very well organized and very well thought through. (Bannon, 2024)

Third, emotions are organised through boundary work: the desired other (‘the authentic people’, ‘the native’, ‘white people’) and the detested other (racialised out-groups and ‘globalist’ elites) are co-produced, binding individuals into affective publics (Serrano and Puche, 2021) around shared feelings that aim to reify who ‘we’ are against who ‘they’ are. Fourth, the narrative periodically stages moments of revelation (‘the government hides the truth from the people’), which deliver spikes of jouissance by fusing moral outrage with a sense of epistemic certainty (Wojczewski, 2022: 131). Fifth, because fulfilment cannot arrive, persecutory supplementation sustains the plot – hidden agents (‘deep state’, ‘traitorous elites’) are invoked to explain deferral – thereby renewing desire and entrenching antagonism (Wojczewski, 2022: 153).

The fantasy narrative of GRT becomes entrenched within the symbolic order by mobilising affective plausibility along with ‘facts’, mainly via dubious statistics. As Sedgwick (2024) observes, the narrative’s resonance is scaffolded not only by fringe propaganda but also by discursive practices that supply an illusion of fixity, translating existential anxiety into a ‘measurable’ demographic threat as the object of fear and anger. In the U.S., broadcaster Tucker Carlson, one of the key figures in the GRT frame (Ekman, 2022: 1132) framed a Democratic elite plot (see also Bannon above) invoking a statistically identified threat:

Joe Biden accelerated that sad trend [of replacing the white population with immigrants] beyond what anyone thought was possible. The foreign-born population is now growing by 132,000 people every month. That’s more than triple the average high under previous administrations. It’s double Barack Obama’s highest totals. According to AEI scholar Mark Perry, we can expect over nine million new illegal aliens by the end of Joe Biden’s first term. Nothing like this has ever happened in this or maybe any other country ever. And it’s happening for one reason. It’s not natural, it’s the product of a policy choice. (Carlson, 2022)

Ekman, (2022: 1135) similarly shows how pseudo-scientific references like above operate as master signifiers that reinforce the narrative and normalise antagonism. Although these strategies do not withstand empirical scrutiny, they are instrumental to construct some individuals or groups as the object of the subject’s emotions. They legitimise anger, hate, and fear and make the narrative plausible. In Lacanian terms, this affective plausibility is a mechanism through which disinformation inserts itself into the symbolic order and makes itself appealing to the subject.

Taken together, GRT demonstrates how disinformation functions as an affective technology that re-routes anxiety through emotions to instal a fantasy of completeness. Because fantasy is the frame through which facts acquire meaning, more data alone rarely disturbs its hold; indeed, within affectively primed environments ‘better numbers’ may be re-absorbed as evidence of elite deception. For OSS, the point is not that GRT destabilises identity; rather, it produces subjectivities by promising jouissance through exclusion, reconfiguring the symbolic order in ways experienced as morally clarifying and agentic.

Conclusion

Steele (2025: 228) argues that, for OSS, ‘the key going forward is to consider the difficult ways in which reorderings can proceed that recognize the necessity of some disordering (which generates anxiety) for the ultimate tradeoff of more just orders’. What does ‘order’ and ‘reordering’ mean when disinformation redraws the antagonistic identity boundaries with significant polarising effect (Marino et al., 2024) as the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory does? To fully address this question, as it has been argued, it is necessary to examine how emotional representations mediate the relationship between anxiety and the subject’s relationship with the symbolic order. By doing so, we can better account for the ways in which disinformation not as a destabiliser of the sense of ‘the Self’ (as in Giddensian accounts) but as a phenomenon that constructs new subjectivities and political imaginaries, and new orders, through emotions. In this sense, the core contribution of this article is to argue that disinformation must be understood as an affective technology that operates through emotional representations to channel anxiety in ways that are deeply political.

This article has reconceptualised OSS by foregrounding emotions through which disinformation operates in contemporary politics. At the core of the argument lies the claim that disinformation resonates because it engages affectively, offering narratives that feel intuitively right, particularly during moments of sociopolitical disruption. These narratives orient the subject towards desired others and away from detested ones, providing affective scaffolding for symbolic attachments and enabling individuals to locate themselves within a coherent, albeit illusory, moral and political order. In this sense, disinformation operates through emotional resonance rather than epistemic credibility, and its efficacy lies in its capacity to satisfy affective needs rather than to withstand rational scrutiny.

The analysis has also challenged the prevailing emphasis within OSS on identity stability, which are often grounded in Giddensian sociological theory. While these frameworks have been foundational, they tend to overlook the unconscious desires and emotional investments that animate the subject’s pursuit of a complete Self. By incorporating Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article has introduced a more dynamic conception of subjectivity that is marked by a perpetual negotiation of subjectivity, driven by the unattainable desire for completeness, and structured through fantasy narratives in the symbolic. Within this framework, anxiety is understood as an affect intrinsic to subject formation, while emotions function as discursive representations that channel this anxiety into the symbolic order. Disinformation, in this context, operates as a fantasy narrative that promises to resolve the subject’s constitutive lack, constructing idealised and vilified Others and offering emotionally charged representations that sustain identification.

The implications of this reconceptualisation extend beyond theoretical refinement. Practically, this means that efforts to counter disinformation, which generates ‘illusory truth effect’ (Pennycook et al., 2018), must include but go beyond fact-checking, media literacy, or the reinstatement of epistemic accuracy. Effective responses must engage with the emotional logics that make disinformation compelling in the first place – whether through fear, outrage, belonging, or hope. This involves understanding not only what people believe, but why they are drawn to certain narratives, and how emotional resonance can be harnessed to build more resilient and critically engaged publics. By conceptualising disinformation as an affective technology, this article has illuminated the emotional infrastructures through which subjectivity is shaped and reshaped in the digital age. This reconceptualisation expands the analytical scope of OSS and provides a timely framework for understanding the affective politics of (in)security in an era increasingly defined by emotional mediation, symbolic contestation, and algorithmic amplification.

The way forward for OSS, therefore, lies in developing an emotionally literate and psychoanalytically informed theoretical framework that recognises disinformation as an affective technology operating within the symbolic order to mobilise anxiety and reconfigure subjectivity. This requires three interrelated moves. Conceptually, emotions must be theorised as constitutive mechanisms of ontological (in)security rather than as epiphenomenal effects. Methodologically, scholars should adopt tools capable of capturing the affective textures of disinformation, including discourse analysis of emotional representations, ethnographies of affective publics, and digital ethnography of algorithmic infrastructures. Finally, OSS must engage in sustained interdisciplinary dialogue with psychoanalysis, media studies, political psychology, and sociology to understand how emotions are mediated, manipulated, and mobilised in contemporary political landscape. Only by undertaking these moves can OSS account for the affective infrastructures that underpin contemporary forms of ontological (in)security and respond to the political challenges posed by disinformation.