The Nation is an Immortal Body

The idea of a nation is sustained by a fantasy about the body. The meaning of nationalism is revealed by this fantasy that is its source.

Adolf Hitler articulated and enacted the central fantasy of nationalism: creation of an immortal body through elimination of the “enemy,” i. e., what contradicts the fantasy of immortality. To awaken from the nightmare of history fantasy that is its source.

In nationalism, the body politic takes the place of one’s own body. "Oppression" is the experience of this massive body attached to the self. One is weighed down and diminished by the symbolic object bound to the self (psychosomatically experienced).

Hitler declared, “You are nothing, your nation is everything:” Lacan said: "There is no other but the other."

Totalitarianism is the fantasy that everyone is contained within and constitutes the body politic. One Reich, one Fuhrer, all human beings bound in a state of fusion with this body; no such thing as separation from this body. The dream of immortality: identification with a body politic to escape one’s own body: relocate the self into this new body. 

Jews symbolized the idea that German immortality was a delusion. “Killing Jews” meant killing the negation of the fantasy of immortality.