Paper short abstract:

Why has the image of continuity and discontinuity captured the imagination of nationalism and its critics since the first articulations of the concept in the late 18th century? Why does a nation find itself in need of claiming uninterrupted and contiguous connections with an often-mythical past invoking medical metaphors of blood and why does antinationalist discourse rest on the refutation of such metaphors?

Paper long abstract:

Why has the image of continuity and discontinuity captured the imagination of nationalism and its critics since the first articulations of the concept in the late 18th century? Why does a nation find itself in need of claiming uninterrupted and contiguous connections with an often-mythical past invoking medical metaphors of blood and why does antinationalist discourse rest on the refutation of such metaphors? Continuity and discontinuity are invoked as processes of identity formation of the nation but not, necessarily, as the mechanics of the numinous infrastructure of the state. Although the importance of large infrastructural projects as statements of the state is visible in its symbolic imposition, be that the case of the Third Reich, the Third Greek Republic, the British Empire, or the French Republic, the small, unassuming and insignificant buildings that might be called the bureaucracy of material infrastructure carry the labour and weight of the state infrastructural apparatus without claiming an overt continuity of meaning and signification. What if blood as a metaphor is not the most apt metaphor for continuity? What if, rather than looking at blood as the paradigmatic metaphor for continuity, one trains one’s eye to the nervous system, to the nodes of Ranvier that show us that the interruptions of the protective myelin on the length of the neurons intensifies the action potential constituting a discontinuity that rather than impeding communication and connectivity accelerates it, thereby enabling the rapid travel of the action. In the cases that I am studying this action comprises the actions of the state that constitute its modalities of governance on the micro-level of the individual citizen. I am looking at buildings that have stood for over a century as places of confinement and exclusion even if the specifics of the confinement are not diachronically the same or contiguous. The examples that I use are the island of Leros, in Greece, where the same buildings have been used by successive and different states as barracks, rehabilitation schools, psychiatric hospital, exile camp for political prisoners, and migrant and refugee hotspot; the island of Goli Otok, off the Dalmatian coast, where the same buildings have been used as labor camp for Stalinists, exile camp royalists, and prison camp for criminal offenders; the death camp of Dachau which was originally a state-controlled munitions factory, a labor camp for unionists and communists, a concentration and extermination camp for Jewish and non-Jewish undesirables, and temporary housing for refugees from East Germany after partition.