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In the minds of human beings, nations are experienced as if bodies. Nationalism represents a collective dream about geographic spaces containing masses of people within this space. A space that contains many human beings identifying with one another--this is what a nation or body politic is.
Nazism constituted a pure culture of nationalism. Their ideology was banal and ordinary, the foundational political idea of the 20th Century. What the Nazis did was to take the idea of the nation more seriously than it had ever been taken before. The actions undertaken by the Nazis suggest a profound pathology contained within the ideology of nationalism. Nazism--what the Nazis did--contains a profound critique of nationalism..
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Abstract: The aspiration of Hitler and his followers was to kill death, that is, to kill Jews--who symbolized the principle of death. Hitler sought to refute the proposition that death comes to every organism. If Jews could be destroyed, Hitler imagined, Germany would become a different—unique—kind of body: one that could live forever.
However, no matter how many Jews the Nazis killed, the specter of death continued to raise its ugly head. No matter what Hitler did, he could not escape the feeling that Germany was disintegrating. Death continued to operate within the German body politic.
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For Hitler and the Nazis, the nation was not an abstraction. The Nazis concretized the idea of the nation, imagining Germany as a real body politic. The Nazis concretized the idea of the enemy, imagining the enemy as a pathogenic organism that had to be removed or destroyed if the nation was to survive. The Nazis’ fantasy of the nation as a real body politic containing pathogenic organisms was the source of genocide.
Nationalism conceives countries as extensions of the self. One imagines that one’s own body is bound to a body politic. A nation is many bodies "united" or bound together to constitute a single body. National "unity" is the deepest dream.
Hitler’s extraordinary feat was to have put forth the view that the nation was a real body--a biological reality—and to have persuaded people to believe in and act upon this idea. He became “doctor of the German people,” enacting the fantasy that he could cure the "disease" from which Germany was suffering--by destroying Jewish bacteria.
Like most instantiations of nationalism, Nazism was a rescue fantasy. Germany could be "saved" only if the enemy was destroyed. Genocide was a rescue fantasy.
The aspiration of Hitler and his followers was to kill death, that is, to kill Jews--who symbolized the principle of death. Hitler sought to refute the proposition that all organisms die; that death comes to every organism. If Jews could be destroyed, Hitler imagined, Germany would become a different—unique—kind of organism: one that could live forever.
Hitler and the Nazis sought to destroy the principle of death imagined to be contained within Jews. However, no matter how many Jews the Nazis killed—affirming the proposition that Germany could become immortal—the idea of death continued to raise its ugly head. No matter what Hitler did, he could not escape the feeling that Germany was disintegrating. Death continued to operate with the German body politic.
Abstract concepts cannot be separated from their source within the organism. The mind is contained within the body. Perception is embodied. Bodies politic cannot be detached from the human organisms that conceive of bodies politic.
Hitler imagined that Germany—the body politic—was diseased and decomposing. He was determined to put an end to this process of decomposition--by destroying the "force of disintegration" operating within the German politic.
Hitler was engaged in an endless struggle to destroy death—the death he experienced within his own body. Hitler projected his experience of death into the Jew and aspired to destroy death by killing Jews. Genocide was a struggle to destroy death by killing the principle of death operating within the German body politic. Hitler aspired to exterminate death.
NO SEPARATENESS OR SEPARATION
Nazi totalitarianism meant that the idea of separateness or separation was forbidden. Everyone was required to identify with the Volk. There could be only one body, one Reich, one Fuhrer, one people. Everything that existed had to be contained within this single body. Each human being within Germany (cells of the body politic) had to fuse with the national organism.
Hitler refused to conceive that any thing could exist in a condition of separation from the body politic. For him, there was no such thing as “external reality”--nothing could be separate from Germany. Every human being--every thing--had encompassed by national life. Germany was everything.
Identification with a body politic implies escape from one’s own body into an omnipotent body. In nationalism, the self is relocated. The idea of one’s actual body is projected into an omnipotent body politic. People become devoted to this entity—and are willing to sacrifice their concrete bodies in the name of this omnipotent body. "Obedience unto death" means absolute submission to the omnipotent nation-state.
Nazism constituted a pure culture of nationalism: distillation or crystallization of its central ideas and fantasies. For Hitler, the nation had to reign supreme. The nation was a hungry body politic, swallowing--consuming--everything.
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