Cahier IV

1998.3.8
Nao

Finally, it (nation) is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploration that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices?

(Benedict Anderson "Imagined Communities" Verso p.7)

Imaginings as a community, or our thinking based on the identity, is often regarded as being in reason or being logical.

It seems difficult for us to find any innocent or transcendent position for thinking about the solution of this problem, because such kind of the position is often the delusion fallen by a thinking based on the identity.

Rather than looking for such position, it seems to me that we had better go upstream to the origin or mechanism of our identity such as imaginings as a community, and our thinking based on the identity.

The beings remain always assembled, present, in a present that is extended, by memory and history, to the totality determined like matter, a present without fissures or surprises, from which becoming is expelled, a present largely made up of re-presentations, due to memory and history. Nothing is gratuitous.

The mass remains permanent and interest remains. Transcendence is factitious and peace unstable. It does not resist interest.

(Emmanuel Levinas "Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence" Kluwer Academic Publishers p.5)

INDEX