ABSTRACT
With an analysis of passport checks this chapter attempts to reveal two main things: the level of discursive constitution and reproduction of our social world, and, in particular, the specific character that this takes on in late modernity. It offers an understanding of the world-society that conceives of the interstate system on the one side and the individual subject on the other hand as entities that are constituted simultaneously by the same practices. The chapter focuses on the nation-state – the form that dominates the organization of the world-society – and elaborates on the conditions of its future significance. It provides a frame of reference that permits us to distinguish between locales and between varieties of local and superlocal or global levels. The chapter tends to interpret it as a critique of the dominance of binary and transcendental thinking in modernity.
