History and Theory (October 2001), 324-346 © Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656

THE NATION AS A PROBLEM:

HISTORIANS AND THE “NATIONAL QUESTION”

ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

ABSTRACT

How is it that the nation became an object of scholarly research? As this article
intends to show, not until what we call the “genealogical view” (which assumes
the “natural” and “objective” character of the nation) eroded away could the
nation be subjected to critical scrutiny by historians. The starting point and the
premise for studies in the field was the revelation of the blind spot in the
genealogical view, that is, the discovery of the “modern” and “constructed” char-
acter of nations. Historians’ views would thus be intimately tied to the “antige-
nealogical” perspectives of them. However, this antigenealogical view would
eventually reveal its own blind spots. This paper traces the different stages of
reflection on the nation, and how the antigenealogical approach would finally be
rendered problematic, exposing, in turn, its own internal fissures.

“How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a
stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity?”
Julia Kristeva

“He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was
permitted to find it only under this condition.”
Franz Kafka

The “nation” has recently been the object of an enormous number of studies,
with widely differing approaches. Despite their differences, however, historians
today seem to agree unanimously on the “modern” and “constructed” character
of nations—in contrast with what nationalists have normally affirmed. Such a
historicization of the concept of “nation” is not ideologically neutral. This “anti-
genealogical approach,” as I shall call it, is aimed to counter nationalist trends:
by revealing the blind spot in nationalist discourse (that is, the contingent origin
and character of modern nations), nationalism is deprived of its intellectual
grounds.
However, this last statement calls for two qualifications. First, the “modern”
and “contingent” nature of nations represents a blind spot only for a specific form
of nationalist discourse, namely, the “genealogical approach” that dominated
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 325
nationalist thinking in the nineteenth century. As we will see, this is not the case
for other forms of nationalist discourse, and especially not for those radically jin-
goist and xenophobic versions that emerged in the course of the twentieth centu-
ry. Second, and even more important, the historicization of nationalist thinking
tends to obliterate the fact that antigenealogical discourse also rests on a number
of assumptions and indeed contains its own blind spots. Ultimately, the antige-
nealogical concept is, as is its opposite, a contingent formation; it has had its own
epistemic and historical conditions of possibility. This leads me to the topic of
this paper, namely, how the “nation” became a subject for historical analysis, that
is, what were the conditions for its constitution as an object of scholarly research.
If the emergence of nations is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is even more
recent as a topic of study. The first systematic studies of the phenomenon
appeared after World War I, and it became consolidated as a subject of scholarly
debate only after World War II. In fact, studies of nations and nationalism require
certain preconditions that were not present until the twentieth century. Die
Nationalitätetenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1924), by Otto Bauer, which is
probably the first systematic work on the subject, provides some clues to under-
standing the circumstances that allowed him to turn the nation into an object of
study. The opening words are particularly revealing in this regard.
National character is not an explanation; it is something to be explained. In establishing
the variation of national character, science has not solved the problem of the nation, but
simply posed it. How that relative community of character arises, how it happens that all
members of a nation, for all their individual differences, still coincide in a series of fea-
tures, and for all their physical and mental identity with other people still differ from the
members of other nations—this is precisely what science has to grasp.1

The nation first had to cease to appear as a “natural” (or “quasi-natural”) phe-
nomenon in order to become a matter of critical scrutiny. This did not happen
before the beginning of the twentieth century. Until then, national narratives lim-
ited themselves to relating the assumed origins of the respective nations; to
establishing the distinct features identifying each one, as well as the principles
that presided over their evolution and explained their effective, historical course.
In short, these narratives articulated the “genealogical” concept of nationality.
As the quotation from Bauer clearly shows, questioning this assumption did
not necessarily entail rejecting the idea of the existence of distinct “national char-
acters.” Yet it did involve the assumption that, whatever these “characters” were,
they did not have to be as they were in a given moment of their historical evolu-
tion; that is, such characteristics were not prefigured in the origin of nations, nor
did they form a part of their very essence. This perspective opened the first fis-
sure in the “genealogical” concept of the nation, paving the way for reflection on
an object (the “nation”) which, having thus lost its shroud of “naturalness,” now
came to contain a question to be addressed. As Bauer said, the “national charac-
ter,” far from being an explicatory principle, had itself to be explained. The

1. Otto Bauer, “The Nation,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso,
1996), 41.
326 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

explanans was converted into an explanandum that itself called for a new
explanans.
This article seeks to trace the different phases in the thinking of historians
about the “national question.” It is organized in two parts, each exploring the two
successive thresholds through which, in my view, the process of problematization
of the idea of “nation” crossed. The first stage corresponds to a series of remark-
able essays, which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, began to put the
genealogical concept of the nation under question, revealing some of the aporias
it contained. I will concentrate on two of them, written by Lord Acton and Ernest
Renan respectively. As we will see, even if they did not articulate a consistent
antigenealogical view, they provided the basis on which historians in the past cen-
tury began to critically approach the “national question.” The second stage refers
to recent studies in which, as I will try to show, the antigenealogical concept is
itself undermined, revealing some of the contradictions to which the criticism of
the genealogical concept conduces. It is at this point that the “nation” turns into
a true “problem,” something that criticism can neither accept nor ignore. This is
so because of reasons relating not only to de facto issues (the actual vitality and
influence of nationalism throughout modern history—a fact which, seen from the
perspective of the antigenealogical view, appears as irrational), but also, and fun-
damentally, to conceptual ones: reflection on the topic of the “nation” ended up
revealing fissures inherent in the antigenealogical view—which, as we will see,
condemn it to remain inextricably tied to its opposite, the genealogical concept of
the nation. Before exploring the process by which the genealogical concept was
to be rendered problematic, however, we must briefly review the context in which
it emerged.

I. THE GENEALOGICAL CONCEPT OF THE NATION

The idea of the existence of distinct “national characters” hinges on the assump-
tion that behind the events shaping a given national course lies a particular prin-
ciple of evolution. This principle provides that a nation is an identity recogniz-
able throughout its changes as a single unity different from all other nations. As
has been frequently remarked, the philosophical substratum for this concept was
provided by the “organicist” ideas of a Romantic matrix, which emerged at the
end of the eighteenth century as a reaction against the “mechanicist” ideas of the
Enlightenment. In formulating an “organicist” view of society for the first time,
Johann Gottfried Herder is, according to most authors, the key figure. He
allegedly opened a geological fault that divided the history of modern political
and intellectual history into two contending sides.
Such a dichotomous view, which regards “organicism” and “mechanicism” as
the two poles in a kind of eternal or quasi-eternal opposition, is, actually, very
simplistic. It rests on an unwarranted premise, namely, that there is one and only
one idea of “organism,” whose meaning has been uniform and consistently used
throughout time—and that the same can be said of the “organicist” idea of
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 327
“nation.” Yet, the idea of “organism” underwent in the course of the last two cen-
turies a number of successive and fundamental redefinitions. Thus, before inquir-
ing whether Herder and the nationalists held an “organicist” view of society, we
should first ask ourselves what they understood by “organism.”2
The opposition between “organicism” and “mechanicism” dates from
Herder’s time, with the emergence of the idea of the presence, in animated organ-
isms, of a vital, active principle, the so-called nisus formativus that radically dis-
tinguishes them from unanimated bodies. This nisus formativus provides organ-
isms with their characteristic faculties: the intrinsic capacity for self-generation
and self-development. In the emergence of this concept two mutually contradic-
tory doctrines of the classical period converged: the preformationist and the
vitalist.
On the one hand, the theory of the nisus formativus took from the “natural his-
tory” of the Enlightenment the preformationist idea of “organism,” which
explained the development of the embryo as a mere “growing” of preconstituted
characters and forms. The discovery by Jan Jakob Swammerdam (1637–1680) of
the butterfly’s complete preformation in the caterpillar was seen as empirical
confirmation of this theory. Only this theory allowed the systematic study of the
order of the universe of living beings, since it alone permitted the exclusion of
the idea of supernatural intervention in the generation and development of
species. But this made inconceivable the idea of “evolution” (in the current sense
of the word).3
On the other hand, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a series of
new developments came to challenge the preformationist idea, leading to the
“rediscovery” of Friedrich Wolff’s Theoria generationis (written in 1759 but for-
gotten for almost half a century). As Wolff observed, in the development of the
embryo new forms and organs appeared which were not originally present in it.
The break with the preformationist theories coincided with the emergence of a
number of new disciplines, such as chemistry, animal magnetism, galvanism, and
physiology, which began to redefine classical vitalist doctrines. This, in turn,
allowed the reconciliation of the concepts of “preformation” and “evolution” (in
the modern sense of the word). Based on the ideas of George Stahl (the author of
the phlogiston theory), classical vitalists had conceived of “life” as a kind of fluid
that merely circulated through bodies, preventing their decomposition; the new
sciences yielded a notion of vital fluid as an active principle, a “material-imma-
terial” (imponderable) substance (like electricity, magnetism, and gravity) or
Kraft that was both fixed and plastic enough to generate a diversity of forms and
organs. According to this concept, what was preformed in the embryo was no
longer a series of visible features, but a logical and mutually coordinated order

2. On the connections between Herder’s philosophy of history and the natural sciences of his time,
see Palti, “The Metaphor of Life: Herder’s Philosophy of History and Uneven Developments in the
Natural Sciences of His Time,” History and Theory 38 (1999), 322-347.
3. See Helmut Müller-Sieves, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
328 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

of successive transformations (something similar to what we call a “genetic pro-

gram”).4
The “genealogical concept” of the nation was historically forged on the model
of the preformationist-evolutionist view of “organism.” Herder’s work clearly
reveals the intimate connections between these developments in late eighteenth-
century biological thinking and the Romantic concept of the nation. His idea of
Volksgeist was precisely the sociohistorical translation of Wolff’s concept of
Kraft or vital force (“inexplicable and unerasable, as ancient as the nation
itself”).5 “This principle,” he believed, “is innate, organical, genetic: it is the
basis of my natural powers, the internal genius of my being.”6 “Every external
form in Nature,” stated Herder, “is an index of her internal operations.”7 All the
genealogical views of the nation hinged on this assumption. This allegedly
explained why, even though nations underwent changes over time, no transfor-
mation could be introduced in a given nation from without if this transformation
was not already somehow inscribed within it as one of its possible, potential
developments. In the work cited above, Otto Bauer later synthesized this per-
spective in the idea of “national apperception,” according to which “no nation
adopts foreign elements unaltered; each adapts them to its whole being, and sub-
jects them to a change in the process of adoption, of mental digestion.”8
Knowing the conceptual ground of the genealogical conception of “nation”
allows us to underline three aspects of it that must be clarified to avoid some of
the simplifications that sometimes appear in the specialized literature. First, con-
trary to what many authors point to in order to refute the “nationalist-genealogi-
cal” idea, the nation genealogically conceived is not necessarily “exclusionary.”
As Bauer indicates in his definition of “national apperception,” it does not reject
the possibility of “digesting” elements alien to it; rather it claims that national
particularities entail specific conditions of appropriation. What is excluded in the
nationalist-genealogical idea is the possibility of adopting foreign elements with-
out first adapting them to the nation’s “organic constitution.”
Second, in the genealogical view the same pattern of relationship between the
“inside” and the “outside” of the nation can be found replicated in the connec-
tion between the whole and its constituent elements (nation and individual will),
with the former indicating only the field and necessary limit conditions for the
unfolding of the latter. In this understanding, nations are, no doubt, objective
entities, predating and existing independently of the will of their subjects. Yet

4. See Lester King, “Stahl and Hoffmann: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Animism,” Journal of
the History of Medicine 19 (1964), 118-130; Oswald Temkin, “German Concepts of Ontogeny and
History around 1800,” in The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Shirley Roe, Matter, Life, and
Generation: Eighteenth-Century Biology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1981); and Charles W. Rodemer, “Regeneration and the Decline of Preformism in
Eighteenth-Century Embryology,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 38 (1964), 20-31.
5. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (London: Luke Hanfard, 1803), II, 42.
6. Ibid., I, 320.
7. Ibid., I, 139.
8. Bauer, “The Nation,” 68.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 329
this objectivist concept does not necessarily contradict the idea of individual
“free will” per se, but only the idea of an “unconditioned will.” The genealogi-
cal concept of the nation actually raises an anterior question to that of “individ-
ual will,” a question that refers to the preconditions of “free choice.” The ques-
tion is, even if everyone may choose whatever they want, what determines these
very wants? The implicit answer is, to put it in Reinhart Koselleck’s words, that
the national character constitutes that space of experience that explains an indi-
vidual’s practical orientations (his or her “horizon of expectations”), and thereby
provides the framework for the individual’s “free choices” to be articulated and
to become socially meaningful.
Finally, the national idea was not necessarily “reactionary” or “conservative.”9
Certainly, the association of nationalist ideas with conservative political forces
has precise historical grounds; however, such a relationship between nationalism
and conservatism was not logically determined, but was the result of a number
of contingent developments and events. The point is that, although typically
“atomism” is identified with “liberalism,” and “organicism” with “conser-
vatism,” there is no logical relationship between these philosophical concepts
(“atomism” and “organicism”) and their ideological consequences. A process of
translation mediates between these concepts and consequences, one that is
always open to alternative interpretations. This translation process necessarily
involves both theoretical and non-theoretical factors.
A consideration of these nuances in the genealogical concept of the nation is
necessary to comprehend it correctly. But even more important in the context of
this article, it is crucial to avoid simplistic views regarding the process by which
the genealogical conception of the nation was eroded so as finally to collapse.
According to what we have seen, the Romantic, “objectivist” idea of the nation
could not be refuted simply by attributing to it reactionary ideological implica-
tions (since it actually did not have specific political implications or contain def-
inite ideological consequences), or by holding against it the right of individual
self-determination (since it did not necessarily exclude or contradict this right).
Moreover, as we will see, the nationalist claim of the need for an objective foun-
dation (culturally substantive collective identities) for the constitution of every
political order or social community could not be disregarded. In short, consider-
ation of the intricacies of the genealogical concept of the nation permits us to
comprehend the vicissitudes in the process whereby antigenealogical discourse
developed.

II. THE FISSURES IN THE GENEALOGICAL CONCEPT OF THE NATION

The erosion of the “genealogical concept” of the nation began in the second half
of the nineteenth century. Two well-known texts by Lord Acton (“Nationality,”
9. Herder himself would be an example of this. According to Frederick Beiser, far from being
proto-fascist, Herder held radical and even anarchist political ideas (see Beiser, Enlightenment,
Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992], 201-215).
330 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

first published in The Home and Foreign Review in 1864) and Ernest Renan
(“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?,” a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in 1882) are
particularly illustrative of this process. They are not only very early works ren-
dering the concept of the nation problematic, but they also set the fundamental
topics that subsequently shaped later antigenealogical discourse.
Lord Acton’s pamphlet was aimed at countering the impulse given to nation-
alist ideals in Europe by the Italian Risorgimento. In it he explored the origins of
the principle of nationality in order to undermine its ideological foundations; he
elaborated a narrative, which subsequently became canonical, aimed at showing
the “modernity” of the concept of “nation.” As he remarked, the Enlightenment
lacked such a principle, as was made manifest during the 1789 Revolution. The
dogma of the individual’s free choice, asserted Lord Acton, was “in apparent
contradiction to the national theory, that certain natural forces ought to determine
the character, the form, and the policy of the State by which a kind of fate is put
in the place of freedom.”10
Acton thus intended to defeat nationalist arguments by revealing a conceptual
contradiction between the notions of nation and freedom: while national identi-
ties indicated objective, necessary facts, freedom referred to norms and will. As
he stated, belonging to a nation was a natural, spontaneous happening; freedom,
instead, required the institution of a legal framework (a state of right), that is, it
was a political construction.
The second aspect of Lord Acton’s contention consisted of a historical account
aimed at exposing the contingent (and recent) origins of the national concept.
The idea of the nation, he asserted, originally emerged precisely as a reaction
against the French Revolution, and particularly against Napoleon’s attempts to
expand it. The French occupation of Italian and German territories, as well as the
partition of Poland, gave birth to the first outlines of a “nationalist” ideal.
However, the modern idea of “nation” (in the “genealogical” sense of the word,
that is, as giving expression to a nationality which precedes it, and explains and
justifies its actual, empirical existence) had a double origin. It turned in short
order from its antirevolutionary articulation into one that was antimonarchical.
The Vienna Congress, given its desire to preserve dynastic legitimacies, was
unresponsive to the emerging nationalist projects. The result was that these pro-
jects, in order to flourish, had to struggle against the reigning monarchies.
European nationalism thus became the stronghold of liberalism and social pro-
gressivism (“the same spirit served different masters,” said Acton).11 The ideo-
logical ambiguity of nationalism would thus be inscribed in its very origins.
In this fashion, Acton tried to show—against the common view of his time
(which still identified nationalism with liberalism)—that nationalism was not
necessarily progressivist and liberal. On the contrary, insofar as it pretended to
found the political order on supposedly “natural” bases (such as language, race,
and so on), it contradicted the principle of individual freedom of choice, which,

10. Lord Action, “Nationality,” in Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation, 25.
11. Ibid., 28.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 331
for him, could only be conceived of as a human (and, therefore, “artificial”) cre-
ation.
However, we should note two aspects of Acton’s perspective that separate his
discourse from the antigenealogical views developed in the twentieth century.
First, although he insisted on the recent origin of the idea of nation, he did not
question its “natural” foundations. Actually, by founding the State and political
institutions on grounds other than the “natural” one provided by the nation, he
preserved the antinomy between “nature” (nation) and “artifice” (political insti-
tutions), that is, he ultimately endorsed the nationalists’ view of nations as “nat-
ural” entities. Second, the preservation of that antinomy is what allowed him to
refuse the revolutionary principle (for him, necessarily “anarchical”) of an
absolute and unconditional individual freedom. But, at this point, he needed to
moderate the opposition between the poles of the antinomy. His line of reason-
ing can be described as follows.
If political institutions were purely artificial formations, that is, if they were
founded exclusively on individual will, there would be no way of constituting
political units at all. What we would miss in the process is that additional ele-
ment, the plus factor that confers stability to the regular order of the state beyond
the changing and particular needs and desires of its individual members. And, in
this fashion, the principle of individual self-determination would also be
deprived of meaning since individual choices always presuppose a framework
within which they may make themselves manifest (for example, to become a
“majority” or a “minority” of something). In short, in Acton’s view, the idea of
the constructed character of the State, if completely detached from any natural
ground, is ultimately self-contradictory. Thus, the opposition between artifice
and nature, subjective will and objective grounds, determined the perpetual oscil-
lation between anarchy and despotism. Lord Acton’s conclusion is that true free-
dom could not be opposed to the nation (that is, nature), an exclusively political
construction with no natural grounds (that is, pure artifice). True freedom rather
conjugated nature and artifice; that is, it was the result of the combination of
minor political units rooted in spontaneous forms of community (the “nationali-
ties”) and organized into more comprehensive political units (that is, “plurina-
tional” states). In this fashion, he stated, “inferior races are raised by living in
political union with intellectually superior races. Exhausted and decaying nations
are revived by the contact with a younger vitality.”12
Implicit in this concept is a certain telos: the idea that humankind historically
advances towards its progressive unification. Thus, the principle of nationality
would represent only a kind of intermediary stage in the march towards the final
goal, which is the assimilation of minor political units into superior forms of
organization. Such a view was very clearly influenced by Great Britain’s pluri-
national constitution. Even more decisive, however, was the process of imperial-
istic expansion that was taking place in those years: Lord Acton’s article is clear-
ly a translation (or anticipation) of Kipling’s idea of the white man’s burden. As

12. Ibid., 31.

332 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

a matter of fact, there is an evident correlation between the first questionings of

nationalist discourse and the emerging era of imperialism (something which, as
Benedict Anderson remarks, students of nationalism permeated by the antige-
nealogical approach very often prefer to ignore13).
Ernest Renan’s article, which moves one step forward in the erosion of the
nationalist principle, has at its starting point a very different context of problems.
Renan’s seminal work was elaborated in the light of the conflict generated after
Germany’s annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, as a result of the Franco-Prussian
War (1871). Those bordering provinces represented a peculiar case, since,
although they were basically German-speaking, their population wanted to be a
part of France. And this explains, in turn, the peculiar characteristics that make
Renan’s an extraordinary document at its time.
The reflection on the Alsace-Lorraine case led Renan to discover that nations
not only were recent creations, as Lord Acton had already argued, but also that
they lacked “objective” grounds. In his review of the development of modern
nations in Europe, he clearly demonstrated that none of the assumed factors on
which nationalities are allegedly based (race, language, religion, geography, and
so on) can account for how they were formed and delimited from each other.
Given any criterion used to “objectively” define a nation, Renan found a histor-
ical counterexample that refutes it—that is, existing nations, that nobody ques-
tioned as such, that did not match the propounded criterion. Renan cited, for
example, cases of single nations lodging a plurality of races and languages; or,
conversely, cases in which races and languages were common to several nations
which, nevertheless, remained clearly differentiated.
Renan drew two conclusions. First, the lack of objective criteria reveals, not
the arbitrary, but indeed the constructed character of the nation: in order to be
articulated as a homogeneous and distinct whole, every nation must first fill its
internal fissures and “forget” the antagonism that historically tore it apart. In
Renan’s first famous maxim: “forgetting, I would even go so far as to say, his-
torical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress
in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality.”14
This, in turn, entails the idea of the “subjective” nature of the nations. The fact
that a nation is historically “constructed” implies that, even though its roots are
clearly in the past, it is not a mere emanation from that past; its articulation
requires a subjective mediation, the manifestation of a present will, which, to
perpetuate itself, must be continually renewed (hence Renan’s second famous
maxim that the nation “is a daily plebiscite”15).
According to historians’ current interpretation, Renan’s texts marked the emer-
gence of what Bauer denominated the “psychological-voluntaristic” concept of
the nation (which, following the traditional dichotomies of intellectual history,

13. Anderson, “Introduction,” in Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation, 5.

14. Renan, “What is a Nation?,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London and New
York: Routledge, 1991), 11.
15. Ibid., 19.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 333
would be tantamount to a return to an Enlightenment idea).16 And, certainly, his
view is at the limit of the genealogical idea of the nation. However, Renan’s “vol-
untaristic” idea still remains within the confines of the genealogical concept.
In effect, as Martin Thom has underlined in a recent work, “as inspection of
[Renan’s] earlier writings would show, he was less committed to the ‘voluntaris-
tic’ argument than his lecture suggests.”17 Renan’s 1848 study of the origin of
language clearly reveals the imprints of a preformationist-evolutionary social
concept. The following quotation is its best synthesis:
Languages, as the organized products of nature, are subject to the law of gradual devel-
opment; but such a development is not a gross concretion, operated from the exterior.
Languages live the same way as man and mankind that speak them, that is, in a continu-
ous fieri; they are endlessly composed and decomposed through a kind of internal vege-
tation, a circulation coming from within. The sowed seed potentially contains everything
the being will eventually be.18

No doubt, one may allege that Renan subsequently modified his view. However,
the point is that the very text of the 1882 speech contains elements that oblige
one to question, or at least to introduce some nuances in, the interpretation that
his was a “voluntaristic” view. Although he himself did not draw any conse-
quence from it, Benedict Anderson has already called attention to the complex
and peculiar syntax of Renan’s expression affirming the necessity of “forgetting”
in order that the nation could be articulated. He said that the French people doit
avoir oublié (must have forgotten), instead of, as was more logical, doit oublier
(must forget). Renan thereby implied that “forgetting” was at once the condition
for the existence of the nation (a “must”) and the proof of its existence as such
(a fact). The “nation” constitutes itself in and through the very act of “forgetting”
its internal antagonisms; yet, for “forgetting” to be possible, there must already
exist a subject that forgets. As John Breuilly has affirmed,
If one takes Renan’s view in this way [that is, as advocating a mere voluntarism] his case
becomes meaningless. The constant reiteration of the statement “I am French” is empty
unless it is linked to some notion of what being French means. In turn, that meaning can
become politically significant only if shared by a number of people with effective organi-
zation. It is this shared meaning and their political organization that constitute a form of
nationalism rather than the purely subjective choices of individual Frenchmen.19

Indeed Renan himself insisted on this double character of the nation:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute
this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the posses-
sion in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire
to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an
undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is
the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.20

16. Bauer, “The Nation,” 71.

17. Martin Thom, “Tribes within Nations: The Ancient Germans and the History of Modern
France,” in Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 23.
18. Renan, El origen del lenguaje (Buenos Aires: Albatros, 1946), 67.
19. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 8.
20. Renan, “What is a Nation?,” 19.
334 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

In sum, this first period of reflection on nations and nationalism comes to its
close leaving a contradiction open: the impossibility of setting objective para-
meters for the definition of the nation led to lodging it in the subjective will; how-
ever, subjective will presupposes the existence of substantive, objective forms of
social organization—which, nevertheless, cannot account for their own origin
and constitution without resorting to a subjective factor, and so on ad infinitum.
In the last instance, it is not Renan’s assumed “Enlightenment voluntarism,” but
this circularity, this oscillation between subject and object, between past and pre-
sent, that ends up opening a first fissure in the genealogical discourse of the
nation, revealing the aporias within.
This circularity would become the distinctive trait of the antigenealogical dis-
course that emerged after World War I. As we will see in the next section, the
antigenealogical currents which in the past century have turned the topic of
nations and nationalism into a subject of scholarly research would effectively
detach the concept of the nation from its genealogical framework, setting aside
the assumption of its natural, objective character and foundations. Yet, they
would thus end up replicating the oscillation between subject and object, past and
present, observed in Renan, now projected onto a higher (second-order) level of
analysis: the representations of the nation.

III. THE ANTIGENEALOGICAL DISCOURSE OF THE NATION

Only after World War I did nations and nationalism become an object of system-
atic investigation. The new approaches now clearly hinged on an antigenealogi-
cal argument. The historiographical tradition was initiated by Carlton Hayes and
Hans Kohn, who in the 1920s began the reaction against the emergence of the
contemporary forms of nationalism, debunking the “organicist” idea of it as “the
natural form of community.”21 They already had as their premise the assumption
of the “modern” and “mentally constructed” character of the nation.22 In their per-
spective, the “nation” was an invented category, a product of quite modern
processes like bureaucracy, secularization, revolution, and capitalism. For them,
the past to which nationalists appealed was mythical; it existed only in their
minds. Following their lead, later thinkers have systematically denounced during
the past century the anachronism of the “genealogical approach.” As Boyd Shafer
has noted, “An often committed error of students of ideas is to tear generic words
like “nation” and “nationalism” from their historical context, to read their con-
temporary substance in the past, and thus to see in the past the generalities and
universals actually evident only in contemporary life.”23

21. Kemiläinem called them the “twin fathers of academic scholarship on nationalism.” See Aira
Kemiläinem, Nationalism: Problems Concerning the Word, the Concept and Classification
(Jyväskylä: Kustantajat, 1964).
22. In Theories of Nationalism, Anthony Smith traces an interesting review of the studies on
nationalism in this present century (Smith, Theories of Nationalism [New York: Holmes & Meier,
1983]).
23. Boyd Shafer, Nationalism, Myth and Reality (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 5.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 335
This shift in perspective was clearly influenced by the excesses of nationalism.
Seen retrospectively, Romantic ideologies now appeared to contain the seeds of
all the evils occurring in the twentieth century. For authors like Max Rouche,
Herder’s historical concept “prefigured the Hitlerian theory of Blut und
Boden.”24 The rejection of the genealogical, romantic conception consolidated
the dichotomous perspective that regarded all of modern political and intellectu-
al history as a kind of eternal or quasi-eternal struggle between two antagonistic
forces: Enlightenment/Romanticism, rationalism/irrationalism, individualism/
organicism, cosmopolitanism/nationalism.25 This dichotomous (and simplistic)
perspective, which lay at the basis of a typically “whiggish” historical perspec-
tive, soon permeated other forms of conceiving of history, such as those of
Marxism,26 and, as we will see in the following section, still is widely accepted
among historians of very different persuasions.
Yet, the antigenealogical view reveals more than the ideological tendencies
prevailing among historians. More important, the ways in which the rejection of
nationalism was articulated illustrate wider conceptual transformations that in
the early part of the century were modifying Western thinking as a whole, includ-
ing nationalist discourse. Particularly relevant in this context is the break with the
preformationist-evolutionary idea of “organism” taking place at the turn of the
century.
In the field of biological thinking this transformation began in 1883, when in
a series of writings August Weismann first postulated the hypothesis of the radi-
cal discontinuity between the germ and the soma (the adult individual), which led
to discarding the possibility of acquired characters being passed on from mature
individuals to their progeny.27 This, in turn, threw some doubts on the models of
gradual evolution. Finally, in 1900 Hugo de Vries dealt the last blow to the pre-
formationist concept by formulating the principle that evolutionary phenomena,
on the phylogenetic level, result from sudden transformations or random global
mutations. The notions of “evolution” and “totality” thus came to be distin-
guished from that of “finality”: mutations were now reduced to unpredictable
happenings, internally generated but with no perceptible end or goal.28
These new scientific developments are representative of the new orientation of
Western thinking that gave birth in those years to a new paradigm regarding time.

24. Rouché, La Philosophie de l’histoire de Herder (Paris: Faculté de Lettres de l’Université de

Strasbourg, 1940), 25 and 91.
25. These two views were supposed to be incarnated in Kant and Herder, respectively. A. Gilles
opens his classical Herder (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1945) affirming that “his function seems to me
to be the counterpart of that of Kant, his great opponent, in the making of the mind of modern
Germany” (v). We must remember that Gilles’s words were written in June, 1944.
26. On the transformation in the Marxist perspectives of nationalism, see Ephraim Nimni, Marxism
and Nationalism: Theoretical Origins of a Political Crisis (London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1991),
and Palti, “Liberalism vs. Nationalism: Hobsbawm’s Dilemma,” Telos 95 (1993), 109-126.
27. Weismann, Essays Upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1891).
28. See Nicolas Rasmussen, “The Decline of Recapitulationism in Early Twentieth-Century
Biology: Disciplinary Conflict and Consensus on the Battleground of Theory,” Journal of the History
of Biology 24 (1991), 52-89.
336 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

Movements, said Bergson, are “self-sufficient and do not announce those to fol-
low.”29 Non-teleologically-oriented processes, insofar as they involved sudden
recombinations of elements, broke with the idea of linearity in the evolution of
matter. Each moment in a sequence of transformations introduces a true novelty,
a new and specific arrangement of the whole. This new concept of temporality
determined, in turn, the emergence of a new view of discourses30 that distin-
guished them from their referential or expressive functions.31 These conceptual
transformations also provided a new ground for the figuration of the origin and
meaning of social formations in general, and of nations in particular.32 Especially
symptomatic of these changes are the displacements that occurred in nationalist
thinking, which abandoned its genealogical foundations. Mussolini clearly
expressed the new concept of the nation in 1922:
We have created our myth. The myth is faith; it is a passion. It is not necessary that it be
a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good thing, a hope, a faith; that it is courage.
Our myth is the Nation; our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this
grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.33

Although he still invoked the national past and traditions,34 what mattered here
was not history, but the constructed image of it. For Mussolini, the myth could
not contradict reality because it itself was a reality qua myth, that is, an effective
historical force. The ideological factors then were detached from the cognitive
component. It was not truth that the myth could contain that mattered, but the
very myth as such; not the said, but the saying, and the social effects it could gen-
erate. As the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg stated in The Myth of the
Twentieth Century:
The life of a race, a folk, is not a philosophy that develops logically nor a process unwind-
ing according to natural law, but is the expression of a mystical synthesis, an activity of
the soul which can neither be explained by rational processes, nor made comprehensible
by the analysis of causes and effects. . . . In the final analysis every philosophy going

29. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) [1889]
(New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 12.
30. Hence Friedrich Kittler’s observation that “in the discourse network of 1900, discourse is pro-
duced by RANDOM GENERATORS” (Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, transl. Michael
Meteer and Chris Cullens [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], 206).
31. In Kittler’s words, “the discourse network of 1800 played the game of not being a discourse
network and pretended instead to be the inwardness and voice of Man; in 1900 a type of writing
assumes power that does not conform to traditional writing systems but rather radicalizes the tech-
nology of writing in general” (Kittler, Discourse Networks, 211-212).
32. See Palti, “Time, Modernity, and Time Irreversibility,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23
(1997), 27-62.
33. Benito Mussolini, “Speech delivered at Naples, October 24, 1922,” in Le Van Baumer, Main
Currents of Western Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 748.
34. As a matter of fact, the fascist discourse never gave up recourse to the genealogical concept,
which thus coexisted with the new orientations of nationalist thinking. In this way, the new national-
ist thinking internalized and made manifest a problem which is common to all kinds of antigenealog-
ical approaches. As we will see, just as the genealogical view could never get rid of the “subjective”
aspects involved in the constitution of the nation, the antigenealogical view of the nation would never
be able to disregard the issue of its objective foundations.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 337
beyond formal rational criticism is less a knowledge than an affirmation; a spiritual and
racial affirmation of the values of character.35

The new tone adopted by nationalism seems to lend support to the antige-
nealogical view of the nation as merely an “ideological construct.” However, this
convergence is, in some respects, paradoxical. Ironically, this shift places the
nationalist discourse out of the reach of the kind of criticism historians attempt-
ed. As Adorno has already noted, the revelation of the contingent foundations of
the nation leaves untouched what he called the “cynical reason” of twentieth-
century nationalism, which no longer claimed for its concept anything but the
status of a myth, of an ideological construction.36 Ultimately, antigenealogical
discourse tends to miss the profound transformations of nationalist thinking in
the past century. Even more important, the apparent plausibility of the arguments
propounded by historians of nationalism helped to obliterate the deep conceptu-
al links communicating their own antigenealogical discourse to the view of their
opponents, the nationalists, links that reveal broader conceptual displacements
taking place in Western social (and scientific) thinking at large. But all this would
not become manifest until the antigenealogical discourse began to expose its own
internal fissures.

IV. THE FISSURES IN THE ANTIGENEALOGICAL CONCEPT OF THE NATION

Three texts by Hobsbawm, Habermas, and Bhabha especially illuminate the

problems antigenealogical discourse faces nowadays, revealing the aporias it
contains. The most fundamental transformations that can be perceived in recent
studies of nations and nationalism are linked to an almost unnoticed displace-
ment produced in the object of study. Renan’s original question was: “How is it
that Switzerland, which has three languages, two religions, and three or four
races, is a nation, when Tuscany, which is so homogeneous, is not one?”37 As he
discovered, such a question could not be answered on the basis of purely “objec-
tive” considerations; why Switzerland is a nation, and not Tuscany, depended in
part on their subjects’ beliefs and self-identities. This answer, in turn, eventually
raised a new question: What leads certain subjects to imagine themselves as con-
stituting one single “nation”? To put it in Katherine Verdery’s words, “How are
identities socially constructed, and how are persons made who have identities?”38
Once the premise that the nation (in the nationalist sense) is an “invention” is
established, it is appropriate to re-orient the focus to the processes and mecha-
nisms that generate and diffuse such myths, that is, the objective and material
conditions for the formation of “illusory,” subjective identities such as national
identities. In sum, what now becomes the object of study is not the nation, but
35. Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, in Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought,
751.
36. Theodor Adorno, “Society,” Salgamundi, 10-11; quoted by Slavok Žižek, Sublime Object of
Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 30.
37. Renan, “What is a Nation?,” 12.
38. Verdery, “Whiter ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism,’” in Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation, 228.
338 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

the social construction of that “subject of forgetting” on which the nation is

founded, and which Renan simply presupposed as given.
Hobsbawm’s reflection on the subject contributes to the general reorientation
of the focus of studies towards what we may call a “second-order level of analy-
sis,” that is, the representations of the nation. For him, such a reorientation of
focus towards the symbolic dimension of nations would allow us to fix what, at
a first-order level of analysis (the nation as such), appeared elusive. As he states
in his article, “Some Reflections on Nationalism,” “In approaching the ‘national
question’ it is more profitable to begin with the concept of ‘the nation’ (i.e., with
‘nationalism’) than with the reality it represents. For ‘the nation’ as conceived by
nationalism can be recognized prospectively; the real nation can only be recog-
nized a posteriori.”39
At this point, Hobsbawm takes up the enterprise initiated some years earlier
by Ernest Gellner40 and Miroslav Hroch,41 which intended to classify systemat-
ically the diverse forms of nationalism and the contexts in which they appeared
historically. However, it is not the classificatory impulse that led Hobsbawm to
appeal to these authors. As a matter of fact, by the time Hobsbawm addressed the
issue, the discussions that the works of his predecessors had motivated and the
proliferation of theories on the issue had already eroded the belief in the possi-
bility of classifying nationalism (thus rendering problematic his assertion that
nationalisms, unlike “the reality they represent,” could be “recognized prospec-
tively”).42 Nevertheless, the core idea on which Hobsbawm’s entire work on the
topic revolves remains valid. Even though there is no consensus among special-
ists regarding the categories into which the varieties of nationalist thinking can
be catalogued and their contents pigeonholed (varying according to circum-
stances in which the classifications are made), all the different approaches assert
the existence of two basic, opposite forms of nationalism, one integrative and
progressivist, the other exclusionist and reactionary.
In Hobsbawm’s version, “progressivist” nationalism is that which accompa-
nied the process of centralization and affirmation of the national states, while the
“reactionary” appeared later, as a reaction against the former, in which the latter
adopted an eminently divisive, and, finally, “irrational” (that is, with no material
basis to sustain it) character. As Anthony Smith remarks, the basic assumption
underlying this version is a teleological view of history, according to which the
purported ultimate goal of mankind is its progressive integration, a goal that
“small nationalisms” come to subvert.
In his recent series of essays on the issue of nationalism, Jürgen Habermas
elaborated this concept in a more systematic way in order to oppose it to the

39. Hobsbawm, “Some Reflections on Nationalism,” 387, quoted in Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9.
40. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
41. Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
42. See Smith, “Nationalism and the Historians,” in Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation, 175-
197.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 339
claims of self-determination by “national minorities.” Habermas bases his
premises on the Rousseauean concept of the individual’s self-determination, in
order to distinguish the principle of citizenship from that of nationality.
Following the antigenealogical consensus, he states that “the national state has
been founded only transitorily on the close connection between ethnos and
demos . . .; between republicanism and nationalism there is merely a contingent,
not a conceptual nexus.”43 For him, the introduction of the modern notion of cit-
izenship came to break the substantive modes of identity, characteristic of pre-
political forms of social organization, and to define a new, more integrative, and
hitherto unknown, mode of social conviviality articulated on a purely formal
politico-juridical framework.44 Thus, for him, nationalism and citizenship do not
presuppose each other; on the contrary, in the long run they are mutually contra-
dictory, since they rest on two competitive forms of defining subjective identities
(cultural and factual, nationalism; formal and normative, citizenship). In this
way, the affirmation of republicanism tends to abolish national differences; “cit-
izenship (Staatsbürger) and cosmopolitanism (Weltbürgerschaft),” he states,
“form a continuum which is nowadays becoming broadly outlined.”45
As we can observe, Habermas believed that the era of nations and nationalism
was coming to its end, as did Hobsbawm. However, immediately after these
works appeared, a series of new events in Europe, beginning with the Bosnian
War, plainly contradicted this belief. This obliged both Hobsbawm and
Habermas to modify their views. Hobsbawm thus turns his former prediction
regarding the coming future upside down:46 “xenophobia,” he states now, “seems
to be becoming the ideology of the masses at the 20th century fin de siècle. What
holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in com-
mon.”47 On this basis Hobsbawm denounces the idea of individual self-determi-
nation regarding national identities, which he now identifies with the Wilsonian-
Leninist principle—expressing a genealogical matrix—of “one state for each
nation” (the corollary, for him, of the “Austro-Marxist system of nationality,”
which understands nationality “as an individual choice, which every citizen has
the right to make at the age of 16 wherever he or she comes from”48).
For his part Habermas claims that what happened in those years was the frac-
ture between legitimacy (subjective will) and validity (objective normativity). At
this point, with reason and will having parted ways, the rejection of the claims
for national self-determination came necessarily to entail also the denial of the

43. Jürgen Habermas, “Cittadinanza e Identità Nazionale,” Micromega 5 (1991), 127.

44. “In a pluralist society,” affirmed Habermas, “constitutions express a purely formal consensus.
. . . Democratic citizenship has no need to be rooted in the people’s national identity. It leaves out the
multiplicity of diverse cultural forms of life and it requires the socialization of every citizen within
the common political culture” (Habermas, “Cittadinanza e Identità Nazionale,” 127 and 132].
45. Ibid., 146.
46. “The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that
it is now circling round nations and nationalism” (Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 183).
47. Hobsbawm, “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today,” Anthropology Today 8 (February
1992), 8.
48. Ibid., 5.
340 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

rights of individual self-determination, that is, the sovereignty of individual will

in matters of national identity.
In this way antigenealogical reasoning comes full circle: beginning by appeal-
ing—against the nationalist allegation—to the principle of individual self-deter-
mination, and ending by denying it. Paradoxically, the denial of the (“liberal,”
“subjective”) principle of individual self-determination now appears to be the
only means of preventing proliferating claims of national self-determination.49 In
“The European Nation-State—Its Achievements and Its Limits,” Habermas tries
to account for this paradox, underlining a fact that in his previous work had
passed unnoticed. As he discovers now, the nation is the opposite term to repub-
licanism, and, at the same time, its necessary complement. Thus the ethnos finds
its places in a breach present in the formalist concept of the State (the demos),
which cannot account for its own limits and foundations. As he recognizes,
There is a conceptual gap in the legal construction of the constitutional state which invites
a naturalist interpretation of the nation to be filled in. The scope and borders of a repub-
lic cannot be settled on normative grounds. In purely normative terms one cannot explain
how the universe of those who originally join ranks in order to form an association of free
and equal persons, and to regulate their common life by means of positive law in a fair
way, should be composed—who should or should not belong to this circle. From a nor-
mative point of view, the territorial and social boundaries of a constitutional state are con-
tingent. . . . Nationalism found its own practical answer to the issue which remains unre-
solved in theory.50

In this fashion, that which to Habermas represents the opposite term to the
concept of the modern State (the forms of collective identities rooted in “natur-
al,” “objective” social ties) now reveals itself as constituting the condition of
possibility for its articulation. Habermas’s response to this dilemma is more sub-
tle than Hobsbawm’s, but both ultimately lead to the same conclusion: the denial
of the individual’s right to self-determination in matters of national identity. This
response intends to follow the example of the nationalists and convert the for-
malist constitutional principle into the basis of a substantive political tradition.
Democratic citizenship, Habermas says, must be “more than just a legal status; it
must become the focus of a shared political culture.” “On such a basis,” he states,
“nationalism can be replaced by what one might call constitutional patriotism.”51
Habermas thereby tries to overcome the limitations of a strictly formalist concept
of political order.
Nevertheless, the reformulation of the idea of “democratic citizenship” in
terms of “constitutional patriotism” will not suffice to fill that gap that Habermas
himself identifies as the fundamental breach in the formalistic concept of the
state. In effect, the assumption underlying Habermas’s proposal to turn “citizen-
ship” into the basis for a substantive mode of collective identity is that only with-
in the frameworks of actually existing nation-states can individuals become bear-

49. See Palti, “Liberalism vs. Nationalism: Hobsbawm’s Dilemma.”

50. Habermas, “The European Nation-State—Its Achievements and Its Limits: On the Past and
Present of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” in Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation, 287-288.
51. Ibid., 289.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 341
ers of a legitimate will. As Habermas asserts in his last major work, Faktizität
und Geltung, self-legislation must be, and can only be, realized through the
medium of law.52 This means that, for those who dissent from the given, estab-
lished legal system, the only right they conserve is, he concludes, the right to
renounce their membership in the given community.53 In order to sustain this
view theoretically, Habermas ends up identifying that which in his theory of
communicative action he defined as the normative contents presupposed and pre-
figured in every communicative exchange, with the present international order.54
Habermas’s argument thus reintroduces Lord Acton’s idea of the precedence
of the legal framework over individual will, but now detaches that framework
from any “natural” foundation. In this way antigenealogical discourse reveals the
deep relationships that link it to its opposite, the genealogical concept of the
nation: for Habermas, the “international order” is, as the “little nations” are for
nationalists, an objective order, that is, one whose legitimacy must be established
independently from—and, eventually, imposed against—the manifest will of its
members.55 This breaks the double equation in which natural = objective, and
artificial = subjective. The paradox here lies in pretending to consecrate the order
created by the Letter of Helsinki, which intended to settle the map of the nations
as it had emerged at the end of World War II, attributing a non-contingent valid-
ity to it, precisely at the moment in which that order has collapsed (and, in part,
by the very action of those presumably in charge of preserving it). Thus, the rev-
elation of the contingent foundations of the existing international order raises,
once more, the question of how to establish the limits and extension of national
communities. This necessarily re-opens the gap Habermas discovered in the anti-
genealogical discourse. Deprived of the material grounds for an “objectivity”
which could be opposed to the “objectivity” of the nation, such a gap now reveals
itself as intrinsic to that discourse. This revelation is thus devastating to it.
A different line of reasoning has been followed by those authors less torment-
ed by the immediate consequences of the nationalist revival in Europe. This line
of thought goes back to the original question of the antigenealogical interroga-
tion of the means by which national identities are constituted. As we saw in
Hobsbawm, this question resolves itself in the postulate of the “invented” char-
acter of nations, in the sense that they are merely “ideological constructions.”
However, authors like John Breuilly and Anthony Smith show that this interpre-
tation still does not respond to the question of why, being all mere “inventions,”
only some nationalist movements get massive support and not others. Up to now
no theory seems to provide a fairly acceptable account of this phenomenon.

52. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, transl. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 126.
53. Ibid., 124-125.
54. Palti, “Patroklos’s Funeral and Habermas’s Sentence: A Review-Essay of Faktizität und
Geltung, by Habermas,” Law & Social Inquiry 23 (1998), 1017-1044.
55. This allows him even to justify the massive bombing of the civilian population in Iraq on behalf
of the defense of that order (Habermas, The Past as Future [Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press], 14-15).
342 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

For Hobsbawm, the elusiveness of the issue ultimately derives from the very
“irrational” nature of “little nationalism.” But, in this way, Hobsbawm only re-
introduces through the rear window that which he had thrown out by the front
door. That is to say, he now expands to a second-order level of analysis (that of
nationalism) the kind of indetermination that he perceived as inevitable on the
first-order level of analysis (that of “the reality that this [nationalism] repre-
sents”), and that he tried to overcome by shifting focus from the “nations” to the
“representations of nation.” Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communi-
ties” comes—at least in Gopal Balakrishnan’s interpretation—to explain pre-
cisely that which for Hobsbawm is inexplicable. The “imaginary construction”
of a community would be anterior to any other “ideological construction.” This
would provide, in the last instance, the grounds for the viability of nationalisms,
determining, in each case, the plausibility or implausibility of the nationalists’
ideological appellations. In short, the idea of an “imagined community” does not
refer to the nation qua ideological construction, but to the very subject of such a
construction (which, for Renan, “must have forgotten”), trying to account for
how it is formed. We have here the objective modes of the constitution of the
(illusory) subject of national illusions. Paul Piccone defined the point in terms of
doxa, or “informal networks held together not by mere contractual obligations
subject to renegotiation . . . but by irrevocable pacts rooted in realities tran-
scending individual wills and involving transgenerational axiological transmis-
sions.”56 Piccone thus distinguishes the “nation” (qua “ideological construc-
tion”) from the “national subject” (qua “imagined community”). He identifies the
latter with the “organic communities” that, he states, logically precede the formal
constitution of every legal order and found it. As he says,
The two obtain in qualitatively different noetic dimensions. One [the “nation,” or the
“nation-state”] is a mere conceptual construction, while the other [the “organic commu-
nity”] refers to a precategorical dimension logically prior to the deployment of concepts
in terms of which experience is structured. The first is contingent, the second is necessary
for there to be social experience at all.57

This provides a framework to understand better some recent critical perspec-

tives of nationalism, such as Homi Bhabha’s deconstructionist-multiculturalist
approach. This approach must be seen as an antigenealogical view addressed to
the level of the “noetic dimension”—the precategorical constitution of subjective
identities—seeking to “deconstruct” and expose the aporias on which the narra-
tives of national identity, as such, rest. As Bhabha states, “the very possibility of
cultural contestation between oppositional contents depends not only on the refu-
tation or substitution of concepts. The analytic of cultural difference attempts to
engage with the ‘anterior’ space of the sign that structures the symbolic language
of alternative, antagonistic cultural practices.”58 For Bhabha, this space depends
56. Paul Piccone, “The Tribulations of Left Social Criticism: Reply to Palti,” Telos 107 (1996),
163.
57. Ibid., 164.
58. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Bhabha,
ed., Nation and Narration, 313.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 343
on the very ambivalence of the nationalist discourse we have hitherto discussed:
the postulation of the “nation” as at once something “objective” and as some-
thing “constructed.” This ambivalence leads nationalist discourse to endless
oscillation, continually slipping from the symbolic to the system of signification,
from the constative to the performative, from the object to the subject of narra-
tion. For Bhabha, it is this slipping that, as we will see, opens the space of “lim-
inality” in which that discourse becomes dislocated.
The essential point that differentiates Bhabha’s perspective from that of the
other antigenealogical authors we have discussed lies in his recognition that
nationalist discourse does not exhaust itself in its genealogical moment (which is
the homogeneous [“pedagogic”] time of narration), but that it also contains an
element of constructivity (“performativity”) which is inherent in it. In order to
“repress” (in the Freudian sense) this inherent tension nationalist narration must
project an illusion of homogeneity, the idea of a “nationality” that predates its
effective constitution (the genealogical moment). But, at the same time, in con-
ditions of modernity, emptied of its traditional foundations of legitimacy, and
“deprived of the visibility of historicism,” in order to be articulated the nation
needs a different space, one in which it makes manifest its present capacity to
sustain substantive horizons of life (the performative moment).59 In this fashion,
The nation turns from being the symbol of modernity into becoming the symptom of an
ethnography of the “contemporary” within culture. Such a shift of perspective emerges
from the acknowledgement of the nation’s interrupted address, articulated in the tension
signifying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the peo-
ple constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory “present” marked in the
repetition and pulsation of the national sign. The pedagogical founds its narrative author-
ity in the tradition of the people. . . . The performative intervenes in the sovereignty of the
nation’s self-generation.60

However, the revelation of the contingent moment of its constitution obliges,

in turn, nationalist discourse to raise the issue of the subjects to which its
“homogenizing narrative” is addressed, the “people” as a subject (and not only
as an object) of narration. So nationalist discourse is trapped in an ever-flowing
cycle in which it appeals to an objective entity—“the nation”—to serve as the
framework and basis of individual members’ identity, and also appeals to indi-
vidual members’ subjective choices as the creator of the nation.
The introduction of the performative dimension as constitutive of nationalist
discourse thus tends to confront it with its own limit-notion, that blind spot which
is inherent in that discourse. This reveals how this discourse finds itself obliged
to permanently oscillate between its two moments (the pedagogical and the per-
59. “We then have,” he stated, “a contested cultural territory where the people must be thought in
a double-time; the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse
an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin or event; the people are also
the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-
people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which
the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating, reproductive process” (Bhabha,
“DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” 297).
60. Ibid., 298-299.
344 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

formative). In sum, Bhabha discovers at this second-order level of analysis (the

representations of the nation) the same type of ambivalence and circularity that,
a century earlier, Renan had found lodged in a first-order level of analysis (the
nation as such). For Bhabha, Anderson’s mistake lies in secluding the performa-
tive dimension of the nationalist discourse into its “originary” moment, in which
the national subject would have supposedly become constituted qua “imagined
community”; Anderson’s approach misses the fact that, in truth, the performative
moment is that permanent foundation on which collective self-identities rest.
This revelation explains why, in order to articulate itself, nationalist discourse
must continually re-actualize that residue of “irrationality” which is inassimil-
able to the “homogenizing” narrative of its genealogical moment. In short, it is
in the articulation of these two moments (the performative and the constative)
that the “people” is discursively constituted, but also the point at which it is dis-
located. The performative dimension is exposed as both the condition of possi-
bility of nationalist discourse and, at the same time, the condition of its impossi-
bility to become fully constituted as such. In the same way that the “nation,”
according to Habermas, is the visible mark of the uneliminable gap in the anti-
genealogical discourse of the nation, the “people” stigmatize the space of fissure
in the idea of the “nation” (as a discursive construction). “The subject,” states
Bhabha, “is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between ‘here’
and ‘somewhere else,’ and in this double scene the very condition of cultural
knowledge is the alienation of the subject.”61
The challenge here is to avoid the “moment of transcendence” in which the
basic antinomies are “overcome.” This means it is necessary to resist projecting
an objective reality (the “people”) as existing beyond discourses, thereby reduc-
ing the performative moment to the constative one. Required is a (“contestato-
ry”) discourse that stays in the tension. Such a contestatory (multicultural) dis-
course can emerge only by placing itself at the exact point in which the national
narratives become dislocated, in the moment of the “unisonance” of the consta-
tive and the performative. However, the question that this discourse raises is,
again: what are the objective conditions of possibility of multiculturalist dis-
course, or, more precisely, what is the “subject” to which it interpellates?
Classical interpretations of multiculturalist discourse provide an answer to this
question. Lloyd Kramer’s is an example. On his reading of this discourse, from the
multiculturalist perspective “the history [of nationalism] is a history of contestation
between those who seek a fully coherent narrative of the community’s existence
and those whose presence, ideas, color, or culture undermine the possibility of that
coherence.”62 (These are the “minorities” within nations.) But this construal
assumes the existence of pre-constituted subjects (minorities “whose presence,
ideas, color, or culture undermine the possibility of that coherence”). The “color”
and “culture” of minorities would not be themselves narrative constructions.

61. Ibid., 301.

62. Lloyd Kramer, “Historical Narratives and the Meaning of Nationalism,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 58 (1997), 537.
 THE NATION AS A PROBLEM 345
This is definitively not Bhabha’s intended conclusion. For him, subjects do not
pre-date their own discursive conditions of existence (the performative moment).
However, Kramer’s reading of Bhabha’s work is not at all arbitrary. In order to
be articulated, multiculturalist discourse in fact needs at the same time as it denies
“moments of transcendence”: the “minorities” as pre-constituted subjective iden-
tities. Hence, as we can observe at the end of Bhabha’s classic text on the issue
(“DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”), he
ends up finding in the “marginal subjects” (forming a “relatively inarticulated vox
populi”) the historical, objective incarnation of “liminality.”63 This “liminality”
appears as an “empty place” (that which transcends the established social order
and has no site in its organic constitution) having, at the same time, a proper locus
in society—the “marginal subjects.” And, once converted into living incarnations
of liminality—the expressions of what Habermas calls “transcendence from with-
in”64—these “marginal subjects” can be projected as historical agents, forming
both the subjects and objects of multiculturalist narratives.
In this fashion, Bhabha’s enterprise of “deconstructing” nationalist discourse
replicates the same kind of slipping between the constative and the performative
that he denounces as inherent in that discourse, thereby undermining the foun-
dations of his “deconstructionist” project. The paradox is that only in this way,
in its own incapacity to avoid the “moment of transcendence” that reduces the
performative to the constative, may multiculturalist discourse prevent the con-
stative reduction that assimilates dissonant voices to the homogenizing discourse
of national narratives. Ultimately, only the permanent oscillation between the
subjective and the objective would permit multiculturalist discourse to carry out
its vocation to avoid (as Kristeva demands in the quotation that serves as the epi-
graph of this paper) “sinking into the mire of common sense” by becoming “a
stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity.”65 However, the con-
dition for finding such an Archimedean point is to use it, as Kafka’s character,
against oneself.

63. “At this point,” says Bhabha at the end of his work, “I must give way to the vox populi: to a
relatively unspoken tradition of the pagus—colonials, postcolonials, migrants, minorities—wander-
ing peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant dis-
course, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern
nation. . . . They articulate the death-in-life of the idea of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation”
(Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” 315).
64. That is, “how the validity claims raised hic et nunc and aimed at intersubjective recognition or
acceptance can, at the same time, overshoot local standards” (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms,
15). For Habermas, the instance incarnating “transcendence from within” is the law; for the decon-
structionists that instance is, instead, the one that challenges the existing legal order.
65. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 298. For a criticism of the “substantialist” view of “minorities,” see Judith
Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Regarding Kristeva’s view, Butler remarks how she also reproduces the kind of slipping observed in
Bhabha. As Butler says, “Kristeva describes the maternal body as bearing a set of meanings that are
prior to culture itself. She thereby safeguards the notion of culture as a paternal structure and delim-
its maternity as an essentially precultural reality. Her naturalistic descriptions of the maternal body
effectively reify motherhood and preclude an analysis of its cultural construction and variability”
(ibid., 80).
346 ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI

We reach here the end point of our story. The deconstructionist-multicultural-

ist approach to the nation, although intended to contend with the nationalists’
views and projects, is actually the final term in the process of erosion of the anti-
genealogical consensus on which reflection on the nation has rested since its
inception one century earlier. Just as the end of the nineteenth century marked the
collapse of the genealogical view of the nation, the beginning of this present cen-
tury seems to be witnessing a crisis of the antigenealogical approach, once its
premises and foundations became eroded and its own blind spots were laid bare
by the convergence of recent political phenomena with a number of conceptual
transformations in the field. What are the new orientations that historians will or
should embrace after the crisis of the antigenealogical view? According to what
we have seen, this question cannot have an unequivocal answer. If this paper
yields a conclusion, it is that conceptual formations are never fully, logically inte-
grated, but are always precariously articulated, the result of contingent historical
phenomena and processes. Thus, insofar as both theoretical and extra-theoretical
factors take part in every conceptual development, it is impossible to determine
a priori the ways by which the current crisis of the antigenealogical perspective
will eventually be resolved, or predict the paths that future elaborations in the
field will traverse. The only thing that seems certain is that, whatever they may
be, reflection on nations and nationalism has now crossed a new threshold
beyond which a mere regression becomes unthinkable. Just as the collapse of the
genealogical view rendered impossible the restoration of the type of certainties
on which it had previously rested, it is hardly imaginable today that the histori-
ans’ approaches to the nation may nowadays blindly or unproblematically rely on
the assumptions of the antigenealogical view, one whose internal fissures have
already been exposed.

Universidad Nacional de Quilmes

Argentina