The ideology of nationalism directs the struggle for survival away from one’s actual body towards a body politic. The body politic substitutes for one’s actual body.
Human beings create and identify with nations based on the fantasy that countries are immortal. Unlike actual bodies (frail and vulnerable, subject to death and decay) nations are imagined to be invulnerable bodies—capable of “living on” through time.
Hitler proclaimed to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” What is nothing according to Hitler was the human being’s actual, concrete existence. What was everything was the idea of a volk that could live forever. Nazis sacrificed human bodies in the name of the body politic. “The individual must die, so the nation might live:” the blood of human bodies pours into bodies politic, infusing them with life.