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| Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan
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Hitler said to his people, “This Volk is but yourselves.” Totalitarianism imagines that individuals are nothing when not bound to a nation. There is no such thing as separation or separateness. The “life” of the body politic takes precedence over the bodies of individuals.
Totalitarianism represents the psychopathology of identification: inability to conceive of the existence of a self-separate from society.
"Symbiosis” is not an “infantile phase of development.” It’s the ground of our being as political creatures: fantasy that we are connected to something “out there.” Bound to the symbolic order. No concept of the self as a being separate from society.
Hitler:
Our Nation is not just an idea in which you have no part; you yourself support the nation; to it you belong; you cannot separate yourself from it; your life is bound up with the life of your whole people; the nation is not merely the root of your strength, it is the root of your very life.
We imagine that we are part of a “dual unity.” We barely conceive of ourselves as separate from our "nation. Selfnation = no separation. Oneness with the sovereign. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Nationalism is a psychosomatic symptom. We esperience nations as if embedded within the self. This is why we fight and die for them. Nations exist inside our bodies.
Nations symbolize IMMORTAL BODIES: they are the only kinds of bodies that never die. Our actual bodies are in the process of decay. But countries “live on.” National life is the realm of "eternity." The "baseball hall of fame." The "rock 'n' roll hall of fame." The "Presidential Library." Culture is the creation of places where eternity resides. We bind our beings to the “immortal realm.”
To partake of immortality, we relocate our actual body into a body politic, imagining that our own body is fused with the body of the sovereign. This fantasy of union with a sovereign is the basis of “history,” not to mention our immersion in the daily life of "the news."
“Obedience” means inability we are unable to resist the will of the sovereign—because we fantasize that our own body is bound to his body: no separation. Symbiotic fantasy is the bedrock of politics: Human beings imagine they are bound to the body of the sovereign (an imaginary body). The self becomes a body politic.
Richard Koenigsberg
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com
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