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(1) What does it mean for a nation to be “secure?” It means that its boundaries cannot be penetrated. Nothing is allowed to penetrate the boundaries of one’s nation. One’s nation is experienced as a body with boundaries. Politics is a form of paranoia, constructed on the basis of the nation as a body that needs to defend itself against “not self” entities.
(2) Enemies are constructed—and come to be experienced as mortal threats—because they are experienced as violating the nation’s boundaries.
(3) An ideology or discourse is a DEPENDENT VARIABLE built upon a FANTASY ABOUT THE BODY. The ideology or discourse is the DEPENDENT VARIABLE based on the fantasy that the OTHER OR ENEMY IS INSIDE (or will penetrate) one’s BODY. The ideology is a discourse based on a FANTASY ABOUT THE BODY PROJECTED INTO THE WORLD.
(4) We project patterns of experience learned from one domain into a different domain—and experience this second domain in terms of the first domain. The metaphor structures the abstract domain: “Understanding one domain of experience in terms of another.” As Benton A. Melnick puts it (1997): “Even our most rarified mental processes reflect our elementary physical experience of the world.”
(5) MAPPING: A METAPHOR REPRESENTS ONE DOMAIN OF EXPERIENCE (a “target” domain) in terms of another (a “source” domain…of experience). Lakoff & Johnson proposed that primary metaphors are “derived from bodily sensations and then projected outward (see, for example, George Lakoff (2018), Philosophy in the Flesh and Mark Johnson (2013), The Body in the Mind.
(6) Bodily experience gives rise to abstract concepts. Unconscious construction of the social and physical world. Ideology is a discourse about reality projected into the world. Lakoff: “Structures of bodily experience work their way up into abstract structures of thought.” Of all our kinesthetic schemata, the container is the most basic, giving rise to a “bounded inner space that is differentiated from what is outside.”
Koenigsberg: the Nation a gigantic body in which human beings imagine that their own bodies are contained. One’s nation is a body with clearly demarcated boundaries: “Me” and “not me.” The bodily origins of thought are conveyed through metaphorical language.
(8) Paul Chilton (2004): The “defense discourse of states.” “Protecting the integrity of the container lies at the core of international relations.”
(9) Koenigsberg: the body is externalized into political units. Relocation of the self into the nation. The nation is an enormous body with which one imagines that one’s own body is fused. The territory is equated with the self: omnipotent identification: equation of a body of territory with one’s own body.
(10) Paranoia: fear that the body will be penetrated: analogous to an immune response.
(11) Metaphorical statements reflect the unconscious fantasy about the body projected into--transferred onto--political unities or body-politics. It is the shared nature of these projections that gives rise to political action, since the bodily-schemas are externalized into a particular cultural ideologies (which gain power precisely because of the ideology's capacity to provide a vehicle for the externalization of the body fantasy).
(12) My technique of analyzing public documents. How one can perceive body symbolism in political documents and how politics is, essentially, fantasies about the body projected into external reality.
(13) Metaphors originate in the experience of the body and grow out of fantasies that arise from the body. Metaphors in political language reveal bodily fantasies. Fantasies arising from or connected to the body are projected into the body politic. Metaphorical language conveys and reveals unconscious fantasies that are the source of ideology.
(14) Arnold Modell interpreting Lakoff & Johnson: “Primary metaphors are derived from bodily sensations and then projected outward.” "Embodied Metaphors,” Setha M. Low. “Cognitive scientists concerned with the development of thought argue that metaphor is the earliest vehicle for ordering bodily sensation & action."
(16) Koenigsberg: The analysis of metaphors that appear in texts is the methodology for perceiving how unconscious phantasies (about the body) are externalized into political and cultural symbols. Analysis of metaphorical language reveals the bodily symbolism which is externalized into ideology: fantasies revolving around the body reveal the structure of the unconscious.
Because states are imagined in corporeal terms, the emphasis in Nazism was put on securing its borders from the invasion of alien organisms – bacilli and viruses. Nazi portrayal of Jews as infecting the healthy German body was only one among many examples. The anticommunist propaganda during the Cold War and much of contemporary culture in 20th Century has imagined enemies (Communists or Aliens) as foreign biological organisms infiltrating the body through spores.
(17) Since the body itself is a bounded system, its boundaries tend to represent spaces which are threatened or precarious. Therefore, nations must secure their borders against the infiltration of the foreign elements.
(18) Johnson, Mark (1987). The Body in the Mind: The “Structure of our bodily experience work their way up into abstract meanings and patterns of inference.” “The discourse of defense revolves around protecting or maintaining the integrity of the boundaries of one’s nation.” "Of all our kinesthetic schemata, the container is perhaps the most basic, giving rise to a bounded inner space that is differentiated from what is outside. This distinction comes to shape our sense of what others have called the "me" and the "not-me."
(19) Mark Neocleous: “It is because territory is imagined in corporeal terms that the state seeks to secure its borders—its orifices and entry-points—from infiltration and penetration.”
(20) If the nation is a part of one’s body, then paranoia and hysteria are the same thing. Hysteria is the reaction of the body to the experience of a danger to the nation that is experienced as a danger to one’s body. Paranoia is exactly the same reaction. Paranoia and hysteria are the same because the object is experienced as inside one’s body. Or: one’s body is experienced as part of the external world.
(21) Emily Martin (1990), TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF IMMUNOLOGY: "As immunology describes it, bodies are imperiled nations continuously at war to quell alien invaders. These nations have sharply defined borders in space, which are constantly besieged and threatened. In their interiors, there is great concern over the purity of the population--over who is a bona fide citizen and who may be carrying false papers. False intruders intend only destruction, and they are meted out only swift death."
(24) Over-identification of one’s own body with the body politic is the essence of Nazism. Nationalism is relocation of self into the body politic.
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