| Warfare is an activity in which human bodies are sacrificed in the name of preserving a body politic. This is what it means to say that “the individual must die so that the nation might live.” To say that one is willing to die for one’s country is to say that one is willing to give up one’s own life or body in the name of preserving the life of one’s nation—the body politic.
In this conceptualization, the individual and nation are two separate entities. On the one hand, there is a body politic. On the other hand, there is a human body. Warfare is constituted by a relationship between the human body and the body politic. What is the nature of this relationship?
The French soldier asks that people speak of him as one who has given his blood “that France may live.” This metaphor evokes a blood transfusion—one in which the blood of a human body passes into the bloodstream of a body politic, thus keeping the body politic alive.
In war, the life-sustaining substance of an individual body passes over into the collective body—sustaining its life.
This metaphor points to the fantasy that sustains the ideology of nationalism and warfare—a fantasy of feeding the body politic with the body and blood of the soldier. As the soldier dies, so the nation comes alive. |