Nationalism: A present absence and an absent presence

• Main Author: Kocan, Gurcan
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1993
• Subjects: Political science
• ISBN: 031588360X; 9780315883604

Nationalism, a profound element of our daily lives, entered the continuity of human history as a process of rupture. While promising solidarity, freedom and liberty and appearing as a progressive force for modernity, it has also become source of discrimination, exclusion, cultural monism, oppression and violence. The discourse of nationalism produced new forms for the subjective formation of the self in terms of the collective representation of the us and the them. Nationalism is both the foundation and the instrumentality of the symbolic construction of imaginary world. Every nationally constructed imaginary world implies a chain of registered meanings and traces on the psychological structure of the self. This nationally constructed imaginary structure of the self allows one to identify oneself with otherness as one is identified by others (as us) or as one acts against other (as them), by being located in a shared yet divided and fragmented world. The cultural and ideological agency of nationalism has been imposed upon both individuals and their social habitat, gaining an autonomous power that generates the conditions for furthering nationalism's implicit presuppositions on the basis of putative differences. Since nationalism may function as trace or as representations, identification of a nationalist autonomy of signification requires that one understand the discourse of nationalism not as a monolithic phenomenon or self-contained structure representing only singular political and historical discourse but rather as an intertextual and differential structure which transforms and is transformed by other discourses. Finally, these intertextual structures of nationalism are shaped not by structures of presence or immanent time but by symbolic traces with their divergent play of different temporalities, by its presence within its absence.