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| Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan
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Identification with one’s nation means relocation of the self: from one’s concrete, human body to the idea of an omnipotent body politic—that replaces one’s actual body.
This is the bedrock of “civilization:” belief that one becomes immortal by fusing one’s self with another domain of existence “out there:” in another place, distant from concrete existence.
This is the dream of historians, but really of everyone: to imagine one is fused with the symbolic order; that there is no separation between one’s self and culture.
Hitler said, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Lacan said: “There is no other but the other.”
That’s when our heartaches begin: the nation—the symbolic order—negates the self. The body of the individual is overwhelmed by the body politic to which it imagines it has become attached. |
