ABSTRACT
Nationalism, argues the author in this chapter, is always problematic; its basic operation is such that its apparently benign form is better understood as a latent moment of its more malign manifestation. Nationalism is intimately bound up with an idea of identification, and identification is a process; identity is not a given. In Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan discusses the figure of the other under the term “neighbour” (referring to the biblical directive to love one’s neighbour and Freud’s critique of the realism of this directive), commenting that “my neighbor possesses all the evil Freud speaks about, but it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself. To love him, to love him as myself, is necessarily to move towards some cruelty”. The encounter with the other, it is argued, can be understood as consisting in three moments: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. In other words, there is that in the other which can be grasped on the basis of identification, that which can be grasped on the basis of comprehension, and that which escapes our grasp. The term given to this latter, ungraspable “component” is das Ding. While, in itself, das Ding must be without value, it tends to have an extreme negative value assigned to it: the evil referred to above. The author considers this gravitation towards assigning an evil 208character to the unknown in the other and the assigning of evil to the other, the neighbour, on the basis of this unknown. This is considered in light of the first dimension of encounter, that of identification and, specifically, national identity. Each of us enters the planet within the boundaries of a space called a nation. To refuse the slippage into an identification, into nationalism, concludes the author, is the point where the hard work starts.
