What accounts for the persistence of the nation as a central object of identification in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s? How can we understand the appeal and pervasiveness of nationalism when it simultaneously could signify one path to and a pitfall of decolonization, as Fanon warned? This thesis addresses some of these questions in relation to anticolonial nationalism in Iran, its political possibilities, decolonial fantasies, and desires. I discuss how three figures articulated discourses of national liberation which mobilized different attachments to the nation in pre-1979 Iran, attempting to understand what these affective relations with nationalism provided as political imaginary and subjectivity. Through a psychoanalytical framework rested on the theories of Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon, I analyze the writings of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shariati, and Forugh Farrokhzad to grasp the rhythms and textures of enjoyment those imaginaries assumed while being discursively constituted around specific signifiers and identifications, such as nationalism, Third Worldism, and Islam. This thesis relies on emotional discourse analysis to assess the meanings Iranian national consciousness evoked in the form of desires and fantasies of liberation and decolonization. Thus, I also aim to acknowledge and discuss the transnational entanglements and symbolic connections some of these Iranian figures articulated within the Third World, positioning them in an infrastructure of anticolonial connectivity and showing how they are in debt to the theory and praxis of other movements, intellectuals, and struggles.