The discourse of the nation : space, time, and identity in theories of the nation
Date
1995
Authors
Kerr, Russell Alan
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Abstract
This essay investigates the meta-theoretical limitations of theories of the nation. Beginning with Benedict Anderson's attempt to critically engage liberal and Marxist accounts of the nation by situating the 'origin and spread of the nation' within a problematic of political identity, the essay traces Anderson's unacknowledged precursors to Max Weber. Weber's concern is with the 'fate' of political identity in modernity, where the triumph of politics as spatial order is deemed complete. In Weber, state sovereignty frames a narrative of the nation as the container of political identity in a resolution of universality and particularity from which critical thought and practice must take their bearings. Weber's discourse mirrors the meta-theoretical resolutions of the narrative of the nation it relates, thus posing the paradox that the condition of possibility of writing the nation is the nation. However, he is unable to offer a critical response to this paradox, because the identity of modernity which locates the nation in his discourse supposes an erasure of his own encounter with Nietzsche. Constrained to the perspective of interiority demanded by identity problematics, the nihilism which threatens his discourse is deferred onto Nietzsche. Subsequent theories of the nation will repeat this deferral, which disables critical theory's capacity to countenance difference. The possibilities of exploring alternative modernities, which attempt to preserve temporality outside the tragic ethics of Weber's fateful nation, are thereby disavowed, as dialogue is reduced in Weberian discourse to monologue: only the Same returns.