Original scientific paper
Nation without Subject(s). What is the Poststructuralist Concept of Nation?
Zrinka Božić Blanuša
orcid.org/0000-0002-6438-6542
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The problem of national identity has recently been the object of an enormous number of studies. Despite their differences, social theorists and historians today seem to agree unanimously on the modern and constructed character of nations. However, it seems that they didn’t sufficiently take into account the effects of contemporary questioning of the concept of subject. Thanks to the poststructuralist problematisation of subjectivity, it is impossible to define nation (as community) as a communion of immanent individuals. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of a different conceptualization of nation, one that wouldn’t rely on the idea of subject as its basic constitutive category.
Keywords
nation; community; subject; Benedict Anderson; Étienne Balibar; Jean-Luc Nancy; Jacques Derrida; Homi Bhabha
Hrčak ID:
62981
URI
Publication date:
21.7.2010.
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