ABSTRACT
As our title indicates, we wish to address the question of nationalism somewhat obliquely, invoking the imaginary malady, or malady of the imagination, that is called hypochondria and exploring its relation to security. We will begin this enquiry through attending to the personal dimensions of anxieties around health and safety and then extend our considerations to what may be termed a biopolitics of hypochondria, which is a question of whether or not hypochondria has the potential to manifest itself as a group psychology. In researching this collaborative paper, we have found that any attempt to make definitive statements about hypochondria tends quite frequently to give rise to counter-assertions. We have made use of this perplexity to structure our paper dialectically, as a dialogue of sorts, bouncing back and forth in the manner of “on the one hand … and on the other hand”. It is as if not only the condition of hypochondria but the very concept of it serves to resist diagnosis.
