The Nation is an Immortal Body

The idea of the nation is sustained by an unconscious fantasy about the body. I interpret the meaning of nationalism by revealing the fantasy that is its source. Hitler articulated and acted out the central fantasy of nationalism: creation of an immortal body through elimination of the “enemy,” i. e., that which contradicts the fantasy of immortality. To awaken from the nightmare of history is to reveal the bodily fantasies from which nationalism and war are derived. In nationalism, the body politic takes the place of one’s own body.

Oppression derives from the experience of a massive body attached to the self. One is weighed down and diminished by this symbolic object bound to the self (experienced as a psychosomatic presence). The self is negated by virtue of the fantasy of an entire nation (culture, or the symbolic order) attached to the self.

One is a “leaf on a tree:” this makes one feel connected to something larger than oneself (the symbiotic fantasy), but also makes one feel small and insignificant. Hitler declared, “You are nothing, your nation is everything:” Lacan: "There is no other but the other." A theory not unlike Hitler's theory.

The volk is double of the self: the King’s Second Body. Totalitarianism means that everyone is contained within and constitutes the body politic. There is one Reich, one Fuhrer, and all human beings exist in a state of fusion with this body. There is no such thing as something separate from this body. The totalitarian fantasy is that nothing can exist separately from the omnipotent organism. It contains all of the people as cells of an enormous body. St. Paul’s fantasy of the church is where this fantasy begins: the foundation of Western culture.

The dream of immortality: To identify with a body politic is to escape from one’s own body: relocate the self into a new body, and crucify oneself with Christ (the body of the Church).

Sacrifice means abandoning one’s frail body in the name of the immortal one with which one imagines one is fused. Nazism is based on this dream of an immortal body: “That no one can, no one must say to me. Germany must live.”

No one can say to Hitler that the idea of immortality will die. Whatever negates this fantasy must be destroyed. The Jew symbolized the idea that German immortality was a delusion. “Kill Jews” meant killing that which negates the fantasy (Hitler’s response to his own doubt). Political violence means killing the dream that one’s own nation or group will live forever.