NATIONS ARE IMMORTAL BODIES
By Richard Koenigsberg
Identification with one’s concrete existence means identification with what is moving toward death—the “corrupt” flesh—that which is temporal, or temporary. One identifies with a nation in order to escape one’s mortal flesh and mortality—to move into a realm that seems immortal. Nationalism imagines that a self fused with an entity that “lives on” after one dies.
Mental representations cannot be separated from human beings—who create mental representations. Nations or bodies politic are constructed and perpetuated by organisms whose minds are contained within bodies. Hitler wishes to believe that Germany is a body that (unlike other bodies) can live forever. However, his perception of the German nation cannot be separated from his experience of his body. Thus, he imagines Germany to be in the process of disintegrating: moving toward its demise. Since his beliefs about the German body politic grows out of his perception of his own body, Hitler imagines Germany—like every other body—is on its way toward death.
In order to avoid knowing what he knows, Hitler projects his perception of death into the Jew. The Jew becomes a symbol of what prevents organisms from being immortal. In order to maintain the fantasy that Germany is a body that will never die, therefore, Jews must be destroyed. Genocide represented a collective struggle to remove death from within the body politic. Nazis killed Jews in order to maintain their belief in national immortality.
For the nationalist, denial of death takes the form of identification with one’s country—conceived as a body that will live on eternally. One escapes mortal flesh by fleeing into the fantasy of a body politic that can live forever. The desire for personal immortality binds to the idea of the immortality of one’s nation or culture. The individual locates himself within a domain that seems to live on.
By identifying with nations, people seek to reconnect with the idea of an omnipotent ego. We aspire to escape our limited, mortal bodies by projecting existence into the gigantic space of national life. Expansion of ego boundaries through identification with one’s nation represents an attempt to recapture the idea of omnipotence. When we identify with a nation and national life, we imagine that we have become part of an enormous body politic.
All bodies die. Hitler and the Nazis attempted to create a body that would not die. Germany would act to immunize itself against the force of disintegration present within all organisms. The Nazis projected the idea of death into the Jew, conceived as a bacterium or virus. The disease within the nation represented a projection of the force of death operating within Hitler. Jews—symbols of death—needed to be eradicated if the nation was to survive. Hitler killed Jews in the name of forging a body politic that could live forever.
Nations constitute doubles-of-the-self. The ego projects itself into a body conceived to be immortal. The body politic—unlike one’s own body—seems to be invulnerable; not subject to death and decay. Jews symbolized for Hitler the voice of doubt or skepticism that threatened to quash the fantasy of immortality. The Jew within Hitler proclaimed that there are no such things as bodies that do not die. In order for Hitler to maintain his belief that national organisms do not die, Jews had to be destroyed.
Nations constitute symbolic objects with which individuals identify in order to escape finite existence and to ascend into a realm that seems infinite. The Nazis sought to abandon their concrete bodies by projecting existence into a dream-body that could live forever. The idea of the body politic exists in order to negate the perception that bodies age and die. Nations represent bodies that continue to exist even as individuals die.
Nations represent containers whose people are its substance, or flesh and blood. As one batch of people is in the processing of growing older and dying (departing from the national container), another batch of people is in the process of being born and entering the world (filling the space of the container). Citizens represent fresh blood that renews a body politic. Hitler conceived of the German people as cells of the national organism. At the moment that some cells died, other cells came into being. The fantasy of national immortality builds upon the idea of countries as self-renewing bodies.
Hitler possessed doubt regarding his belief that Germany was an immortal body. He imagined that Germany was suffering from a disease—caused by Jewish bacteria—that might bring about the demise of the nation. In order to maintain his belief that Germany would live on, therefore, Jews had to be destroyed. The architect of the Final Solution, Heinrich Himmler declared: “We must slay the bacteria or it will slay us.” The Nazi movement was a struggle against pathogenic organisms within the national body conceived as the source of death.
In order to escape the process of death operating within our bodies, we attach to symbolic bodies—nations—that seem capable of transcending death. Nazism constituted a struggle against death—against Jews and communists conceived as entities that cause nations to collapse. Hitler persuaded the German people to undertake projects of monumental violence (genocide and war) in the name of the fantasy that Germany was a body that could live forever.
Nationalism relocates the self into a place that seems to exist “out there.” Nations articulate the desire to project the self into culture. Symbolic objects seem to have an objective existence—separate from the bodies of individuals. Unlike one’s actual body, the body of culture seems immune from decay. Human beings come and go, but nations and cultures seem to live on. Nations are the “second body of the king” (Ernst Kantorowicz).
For the nationalist, one’s own body and one’s nation are imagined to be a single entity. The fantasy that one is symbiotically bound to a national body functions to negate our sense of finiteness and mortality. However, this fantasy generates problems. People come to feel oppressed by the national body to which they have become attached. The body politic is experienced as a hegemonic object inhibiting and weighing down the self. What a burden to carry an entire nation within the self!</p>