ABSTRACT
In principle no modern nationalism has relinquished warfare. The national practices itself into presence through the celebration of sacrifice. National death makes the absence that opens the future before the living. Filling the absence through commemoration, the living move into this future. Commemorating the national dead makes them present in the future, filled by the living practicing this memorialism. The national dead are pioneers of a sort, braving the way to life through death, through the death of their own future, towards the eternal. Therefore the future of the living is the presence of the dead. Making the national dead present is the sign of the future for the living national. This is why nationalism cherishes making and experiencing absence through sacrificial violence. The invocation of sacrifice leads inevitably to filling its holes with a sense of presence, felt as holistic, and therefore including the future into which the living are moving.
