The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

264 genocide’s wake
and of fantasy formation. Recognizing the material force of the historical unconscious,
I emphasized the formation, inheritance, and devolution of essentialist symbolic
systems or grids of perception. What are the building blocks of such essentialist
constructs? My analysis contributes to an archaeology of essentialist
metaphysics in the public sphere of modern Germany. Throughout I inquired how
essentialism is made. How does it achieve such a deterministic and habitual hold
on the experience, perception, and processing of reality?
My treatment of essentialism as a formative construct and my orientation toward
the notion of a historical unconscious mean that the point of emergence of
ethnographic data in this type of study does not conform to the highly localized/bounded
profiling or extraction of data typical of conventional anthropological
analysis. A major historical condition for the replication of essentialism, as
I document in this chapter, is the continuous oscillation between free-floating fantasy
formations and their frightening instantiations in precise locales and in specific
performances: public nudity and eliminationist speech acts. From what discreet sites
of social experience, class affiliation, or gender identity does essentialist fantasy
originate? We are no longer within the circumscribed space of childhood socialization,
the nuclear family, the residential community. Popular culture and mass
media have deterritorialized fantasy, although instantiations of fantasy can be given
a discrete coordinate or topography. In many cases, the fantasy formations, particularly
those embedded in linguistic and visual icons, as I demonstrate, crisscross
divergent class and political positions: thus the common symbolic grammar of
blood between the fascists and the New Left, or the disturbing evidence for a common
logic of elimination between the antifascist Left and the Nazis. Such essentialist
fantasy formations gather force and momentum precisely because of their
indistinct parameters in cultural repertoires. This fuzziness evades simplistic
cause/effect analysis. Rather, as my research suggests, it requires ethnographic exploration
on a heterogeneity or montage of discursive and image-making sites: political
demonstrations, the mass media, popular memory, linguistic substrata, body
practices, and symbolic geographies, which all share a translocal, national scope.
The German instrumental imagination of current ideologies of violence works
with mystified bits and pieces of materiality, rehabilitating old positivities in the
search for social anchorage. We are in the material culture of the body (blood, race,
nudity), and the linked somatic and medicalized nationalism that has specific German
(but also trans-European) coordinates. A root metaphor of the German state
defines citizenship by blood (as opposed to soil—that is, place of birth—as in the
case of France). Blood and soil, body and space, constitute the materialist theory
of national interiority and foreign exteriority. There exists a fundamental contradiction
between the liberal state’s promotion of tolerance and the founding charter
of familial blood membership, which underwrites stigmatizing imageries of otherhood.
For the pathos of the nation state, that is, the political community as an
object of patriotic feeling, derives from the liberal revolution, with its infantilization
and gendering of the subjects of the “fatherland.”