In reference to the hypothesis of social psychologist Richard Koenigsberg that the individual tends to identify himself with the formation of the national ego, and that of Sigmund Freud, for whom the Ego is always related to the surface of the skin, architecture is seen as a product of marking the skin in rites of passage.

Boundless “Europe without boundaries”

This boundless “Europe without Boundaries” has meant many different things, including the fact that the European boundaries are everywhere where the colonial imagery of the European man has drawn a map or a border, on land or sea. But borders tend to internalize, to change and move, and people often carry them not only within themselves, in their identities, but also in their immigrant baggage.z

 Migrations from Africa and the Middle East, rather sporadic in the previous years, have meanwhile turned into a permanent wave that has changed our understanding of Europe’s boundaries: more precisely, it has revealed parts of the truth on this Europe, especially the central ideologeme of the EU – “Europe without Boundaries.”

We have suddenly discovered that besides the colonial Europe without boundaries, and the proclaimed Europe without boundaries for the EU citizens, there is also the Fortress Europe, consisting of a series of small national fortresses with their own borders, suddenly visible again.

Individual ego and its identification with the national ego

The notion of Other as a protectional construct is necessary for building up and maintaining our identity, but the Other can be tolerated only if remaining distant, since the possibility of fusion with the other and blurring the boundaries causes anxiety, while the phantasm of erasing the boundaries gives rise to hysteria and paranoia.

According to Richard Koenigsberg, the individual ego tends to identify itself with the national one; he claims that human beings exist in a symbolic relation with their societies.3 Individuals identify very profoundly, and our ego may become one with the national ego. According to Koenigsberg, Foucault should be read backwards: it is not the discourse that shapes the body; instead, the body is a source of discourse.

 Body politic is not a mere metaphor, but expresses the fact that the nation is experienced as the body. And since nations are perceived in corporal terms, they seek to secure their boundaries, their openings and entry points, to prevent infiltration and penetration.

The experience of one’s nation with its unsafe and porous borders is equal to the fear that the boundaries of one’s own body will be attacked, infiltrated, or penetrated. Since the nation is experienced as a projection of one’s own body, hysteria and paranoia are products of the idea about one’s boundaries being threatened.

This entire repertory of hysteria and paranoia, which creates a fantasy of rape as a fantasy of one’s own borders being penetrated, could be seen during the emigrant and refugee crisis at the “Balkan route” in 2015/16, when the Other came too close to the EU in the form of a migrant wave, which resulted in the rightist-populist radicalization of the field of politics and the partial segmentation of Europe with the exit of Great Britain from the EU.

Knowing the body means living in the whole, as both a subject and object, as the perceived and the perceiving; I am my body, says Merleau-Ponty, and to live the body also means to live the space. What Merleau-Ponty calls the Flesh creates a common world based on a fundamental exchange of the perceptible, between the world and the body; the sensible is directly linked to the intelligible.

 “All ideas are given to us in the carnal experience. There is no idea without the body, without the sensitive. To perceive, it is exactly to make present something by means of the body. The notion of flesh bursts the idea of subjectivity, because it brings to light the reciprocity and the interlacing of the body and the world. (...) The flesh of the body participles on the flesh of the world. (...) Now, we look at this kind of relationship between the body and the space from the point of view of the architecture, which is a realization of the thought of the space.

Merleau-Ponty has posited the body as a primary site of knowing the world, contrary to another philosophical tradition that posits the mind as a source of knowledge. Thus articulated, the primacy of incorporated knowledge has taken him from phenomenology to that which he has termed “indirect ontology” or ontology of “the flesh of the world.”