Nationalism directs the struggle for survival away from one’s actual, human body into a body politic. The body politic becomes a substitute or stand-in 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 the German people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” What was nothing was the human being’s actual, concrete existence. What was everything was the idea of a volk that could live forever.
One of the Nazi's slogans was, “The individual must die so the nation might live,” suggesting that blood drained from human bodies poured into the German body politic, infusing it with life.