Foucault has spawned voluminous research revolving around the idea that the body is shaped by discourse. In this exciting, pathbreaking study, Richard Koenigsberg hypothesizes that discourse arises out of the body—that ideologies represent the externalization of bodily experience and fantasy. Available now at a special rate: This book (list $15.95) may be purchased now at the very special price of $9.95. Click here for information on getting your personal copy. Publisher: Library of Social Science Author: Richard A. Koenigsberg ISBN-13: 9780915042258 List Price: $15.95 Discount Price: $9.95 “This is a truly bold and provocative treatise. The nation is seen as the symbolic embodiment of a communal ego, cleansed of the ‘badness’ introduced by a particular class of persons within a nation’s boundaries whose ‘removal’ by whatever means is easily rationalized if goodness is to be restored. The interpretations are intriguing and illuminating, the scholarship creative and careful. Koenigsberg provides a provocative account of the profound interplay of exceptional political commitments and psychopathology.” —Dan B. Thomas, Professor of Political Science in the journal Political Psychology “Koenigsberg identifies core phantasies that underlie modern man's 'absolute faith in the reality of the nation.' According to the nationalists' phantasy of biology, the nation is susceptible to disease invading its body. The source of this disease is an alien class of people within the national body. The nationalist cure to restore the narcissistic ego consists of an 'exorcism' that removes this group from within the sickly, decaying national body. Koenigsberg's argument possesses a relentlessly propositionally Euclidean quality. In his interpretation of the dynamics of nationalists' crisis of belonging, Koenigsberg has identified numerous recurrent, timeless elements in diverse social movements. A remarkably sinewy work, lays a secure foundation for future work." —Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism

What are Nations?

When hearing the phrase, “the nation,” we assume we understand what people are talking about. But to what, actually, does the term “nation” refer? Where are nations located? Of course, a nation or country contains millions of human beings, is based within a given territory, and possesses governing institutions that perform a multitude of activities. However, nations are more than referents in the real world.

In The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism, Koenigsberg interrogates the meaning of the idea of “the nation,” examining the underlying structure of this ideology, and the fantasies that sustain it.

Nationalism as a Religion

Koenigsberg shows how nations become objects of the religious impulse. So deeply felt is the religion of nationalism that in contemporary societies people possess an absolute faith in the reality of these entities. Politics revolves around faith in these entities. Though it is difficult to precisely say what a nation is, people relate to them as if they are real, concrete things.

While Christians worship an object that is invisible, nationalists worship an object that can—in some sense—be “perceived.” Johann Fichte describes the nation as a thing "in whose soul heaven and earth, visible and invisible meet and mingle, and thus, and only thus, create a true and enduring heaven."

We believe that we live in a rational world, and that our central preoccupation is reality. Existing coextensively with this "profane" world, however, is this "sacred object," the nation. The nation may be viewed as a sacred object that merges with, or "saturates" our day-to-day reality: an object that "accompanies us" as we move through our daily activities.

We no longer place God in the center of our lives—his "manifestations" are not readily observable. Yet we have no trouble "believing in" the nation: its manifestations seem everywhere. The Christian deity falls before the empirical spirit: "What is the evidence for the existence of God?" One rarely hears the question: "What is the evidence for the existence of the nation?"

National Purification

A common theme within the cultural of nationalism is the idea that certain classes of people within the nation are the source of evil, badness or destructiveness.

Genocide—as well as other virulent forms of political and cultural violence—grows out of the idea that if the nation is to remain healthy and safe, particular classes of people must be “removed” from within its boundaries.

Hitler is famous for his description of Jews as bacteria or viruses—sources of a disease within the body of the people that had to be removed if Germany were to survive. In The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Koenigsberg examines a similar fantasy appearing in the rhetoric of communist leaders.
Stalin viewed his communist party as a “living organism.” Mao stated that he would not allow inroads of germs to contaminate the communist party—to “eat into our healthy organisms.” Revolutionary violence may be undertaken as a form of surgery.

Dimitrov, one of Stalin’s assistants, described the purge of the mid-30s in terms of the necessity of “cutting into good flesh in order to get rid of the bad.” And Lenin claimed that the way of reform was the way of delay and procrastination—of the painfully slow “decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism.” The revolutionary way was the way of “quick amputation:…the direct removal of the decomposing parts.”

In this rhetoric of purification through surgery, the nation is conceived as an actual organism—a real body politic. Certain classes of people are conceived as alien or foreign entities within the national organism—whose presence is the source of disease. Political action is undertaken, consequently, to “save the people” by removing the source of its affliction.

Mass murder is conceived as therapy: the source of the disease must be destroyed. Leaders who generate collective forms of violence think of themselves—not as murderers—but as men who have undertaken a “necessary task” in order to maintain the goodness or health of the people.

The Bodily Roots of Politics

Psychoanalysis of Racism suggests a theory of politics that understands the body as source. Foucault has spawned voluminous research revolving around the idea that the body is shaped by discourse. Koenigsberg hypothesizes that discourse arises out of the body—that ideologies represent the externalization of bodily experience and fantasy.

Nations may be understood as containers for the narcissism of an entire group of people: symbolic objects representing a massive, gigantic ego. Nations internalize and incorporate what is identified as self, and reject that which is conceived as not-self. Radical nationalists or revolutionaries may conceive of violence in terms of surgery—or immunology.

Freud stated that the perception of one’s ego is derived from perceptions emanating from one’s body (that the ego, ultimately, is a body ego). Extending this hypothesis in The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism, Koenigsberg suggests that our perception of political units may be derived from experiences and perceptions rooted in the human body. Nations symbolize bodies, and become substitutes for our bodies. In place of our vulnerable, mortal body, we place faith in a gigantic, omnipotent body politic that we imagine will “live on.”

Table of Contents

I. The Country, the Mother and Infantile Narcissism

1. Introduction
2. The Country as Suffering Mother
3. The Country as Omnipotent Mother
4. The Country as a Projection of Infantile Narcissism
   

II. The Country as a Living Organism

1. Racism and Revolution as a Wish to Eliminate the "Disease" from Within the Body of the Nation
2. The Disease Within the Nation as a Projection of Malignant Internal Objects
   

III. Revolution as a Struggle against Passivity

1. The Struggle Against Passivity: Hitler
2. The Struggle Against Passivity: Lenin
3. The Struggle Against Passivity: Aurobindo
   

IV. The Social Psychology of Nationalism

1. The "National Community"
2. Totalitarianism
3. The Renunciation of Personal Gratification in the Name of a Devotion to the Collectivity