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What does the image below mean? What we see are many bodies fused to create or constitute one body. The "King's body" consists of the bodies of his subjects. The body of the King is not separate from the bodies of his subjects. The subjects are not separate from the body of the King. They constitute a "dual unity:" a symbiotic fantasy of union.
The King's subjects cannot escape the body of the King. They are fused within his body. They are "at one" with his body. What's more, the King does not exist without the bodies of his subjects. Without the bodies of his subjects attached to his own body, the King is empty: nothingness.
The essence of "oppression" is contained within this image: subjects cannot escape the body of the King. As long as one is bound to the body politics, there is no place to go.
Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan
The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan depicts the head and torso of a long-haired, mustachioed man. Upon close scrutiny, it becomes evident that the man’s torso and arms are composed of tiny individual persons, crowded closely together and each looking toward the head of the composite Leviathan.
Hitler and Nazism sought the fulfillment or actualization of the fantasy of the Leviathan. Hitler proclaimed to his youth: “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. You are all one, belonging to me.”
The essence of Hitler’s Nazi ideology is contained within the following passage:
My Movement encompasses every aspect of the entire Volk. It conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism. There is no such thing as non-responsibility in this organic being, not a single cell which is not responsible, by its very existence, for the welfare and well-being of the whole.
Each of the bodies in the image of the Levianthan is like a cell in the national organism. Each German is a cell in the national organism. A cell cannot escape from the body of which it is a part.
This is the totalitarianism fantasy: imagining that there is no existence apart from the body politic. That there is no such thing as separation or separateness.
Our relationship to the sovereign--to one's nation--is fundamentally psychosomatic. One experiences one's body as if fused to a body politic. One imagines that one is contained within the body of the leader. The leader imagines that all of his subjects are bound to him. "National unity" is a symbiotic fantasy
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