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USER JOURNAL TITLE: PAJ : a journal of performance and art.

ARTICLE TITLE: On Nationalism

ARTICLE AUTHOR: Kis, Danilo

VOLUME: 18

ISSUE: 2

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YEAR: 1996

PAGES: 13-17

ISSN: 1520-281X

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Performing Arts Journal

Performing Arts Journal

PAJ 53 (Volume 18, Number 2), May 1996
The MIT Press
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On Nationalism
Danilo Kis — (bio)

Theatre, Nationalism, and Disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia

First of all, nationalism is paranoia—collective and individual paranoia. As a collective

paranoia, nationalism is born out of fear and envy. But above all, it appears as a result of an
individual’s lost consciousness. Therefore, collective paranoia is nothing else but a summary
of many individual paranoias brought together to a level of paroxysm. If an individual is not
able to “express” himself within the framework of his given society, or if that given society
does not stimulate him as an individual, or if disqualifies him—that is, if the society does not
allow him to discover his own entity—then that individual is forced to look for his entity
outside the society’s identity and outside society’s social structures. In so doing, the individual
becomes a member of a clandestine group whose goal and task is, or seems to be, to solve
problems of monumental importance: a survival and prestige of that group’s nation. It seeks to
preserve its national tradition, values, and relics, its national folklore, philosophy, ethics,
literature, etc. Obsessed with that secret, semi-public or public mission, our Mr. X becomes a
man of action, a national tribune, a pseudo-individual. And now, when he is brought down to
earth, to his own size, when he is isolated from the faceless crowd and removed from the post
where he has placed himself, or where others have placed him, we have before our eyes an
individual without individuality, a nationalist, Cousin Jules. He is the same Jules Sartre wrote
about, Jules who is no one in the family, a nil, and whose only virtue is to turn red whenever
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the word “Englishmen” is mentioned. That pale face, that fever, that “secret” of his to know
how to become pale when Englishmen are mentioned, that is his only social entity. It makes
him important and proves his existence.

For god’s sake don’t mention English tea before him. Immediately all of the people at the
table will start to give you signals, to kick you under the table because Cousin Jules is very
sensitive about the Englishmen. They all know Cousin Jules hates Englishmen. He loves his
own, the Frenchmen. As a matter of fact, Jules becomes individual, someone, thanks to
English tea.

This picture could be an accurate portrait of all nationalists and could be defined as follows:
a nationalist, almost by rule, as a social being and individual, is a negative figure—a
nothingness. That is, by definition, he is a cipher. Actually, he has [End Page 13] neglected his
home and family, his job (usually he is a bureaucrat), his literature (if he is a writer at all), his
community service and public responsibilities, because all these things are insignificant in
comparison to his messianism. Needless to say, he is an ascetic by choice, a potential warrior
who awaits his moment. Nationalism is, as Sartre would put it arguing about anti-Semitism, “a
total and free choice, a global stand that one has not only toward other nations, but toward
people in general, and toward history and society as well. It is simultaneously both a passion
and a world view.” A nationalist is, by definition, an ignorant. Nationalism is therefore a stage
of spiritual laziness and conformity.

For a nationalist everything is easy because he knows, or he thinks that he knows, his
qualities, values, and abilities. That is, he knows the qualities of his nation, he knows his
nation’s ethical and political values. And of course he is not interested in and does not care
about the others. The others are hell (other nations, other tribes). And he does not need any
information about them. The nationalist sees and recognizes in the others only himself—the
nationalist. As we said earlier, it is a very comfortable situation. Fear and Envy. According to
the national matrix, the nationalist believes that not only the others are hell, but everything
which is not his (Serbian, Croatian, French . . .) is alien to him.

Nationalism is an ideology of banality. Nationalism, therefore, is a totalitarian ideology.

Nationalism, in fact, is not only in its etymological sense, but by definition as well, the last
remaining ideology and demagogy which addresses the nation. 1 Writers know that very well.
That is why every writer who declares that he writes “from and for the people,” who says that
he subordinates his individual voice to that higher call—the national interest—should be
suspected as a nationalist. Nationalism is kitsch. In the Serbo-Croatian version it is a struggle
for dominance over the national origin of Ginger-Bread Heart. 2

Usually a nationalist neither speaks any foreign language nor knows a variation of his own,
nor knows anything about other cultures. He is not interested in them. But this is not that
simple. If he speaks by some chance some foreign language, and accordingly, as an
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intellectual, has some knowledge about the cultural heritage of some other nation, then he
uses that knowledge only to draw analogies which will undermine that other nation. Kitsch
and folklore, or rather folkloric kitsch, is nothing else but disguised nationalism. It is fertile
ground for nationalistic ideology. The expansion of folklore in the world today is not a product
of increased interest in anthropology but of the rise of nationalism. Insisting on the outspoken
phrase couleur locale (especially if it is out of some literary context and if it does not serve the
artistic truth) is also nothing else but one version of hidden nationalism. Nationalism is
therefore and, above all, a negative spiritual category, because nationalism is based on and
lives by denial and on denial. We are not those people who they are. We are the positive pole;
they are the negative one. Our national values, our nationalistic values, have some function
only if we compare them with others: we are nationalists, but they are worse than we are. We
slaughter (only when [End Page 14] we have to), but they slaughter even more than we do. We
are drunkards, but they are alcoholics. Our history is accurate only in relation to theirs. Our
language is pure only if compared to theirs.

Nationalism is fed by relative notions. There are no general ethical or aesthetic values. For
the nationalists there are only relative values. In that sense, nationalism is a rigid conservatism
and a return to the past. You just have to be better than your brother or half-brother; the rest is
not important at all. A nationalist does not care about anything else. What he wants is just to
jump a little bit higher than his brother. Who cares about the others!! That is what I call fear.
The rest of the world has a right to be better than we are, to get ahead of us; we don’t care
about that. The goals of nationalism are always achievable goals. They are achievable because
they are ordinary, and they are ordinary because they are sly. You do not jump or shoot to
score a point, to reach the peak of your abilities, but only to defeat, to kill the others, those so
similar and, at the same time, so di erent from you. They are the main reason for the whole
game. A nationalist is not afraid of anything or anyone but his brother. He is scared of his
brother pathologically and existentially: the victory of his chosen enemy is to him his own,
absolute defeat. It means annihilation of his entire being. Since he is a coward and zilch, a
nationalist does not have higher goals. The victory over his chosen enemy, that other one, is
his highest victory. That is why nationalism is an idea of misery, an ideology of a possible
victory, a guaranteed victory, and not quite definite, final defeat. The nationalist is not afraid of
anyone, “anyone but God,” and his god is made on his own terms and in his own image—his
pale Cousin Jules. And he is: his brother who lives next door, his neighbor who is as incapable
as he himself is, his cousin who is a “pride of the family,” who is a good citizen, an organized
member of the family and/or a conscious part of the nation—that pale Cousin Jules.

We have said that to be a nationalist means to be individual without obligations. “The

nationalist is a coward who does not like to admit that he is a coward; a killer who suppresses
his a inity for killing, incapable of suppressing that feeling but also incapable of committing
such crime in public. He can do that, he can kill only if he is hidden, only from the unanimity of

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 the crowd. He is an unsatisfied individual who is afraid to rebel because he is afraid of the
consequences of his rebellion”—these are the real features of Sartre’s anti-Semite mentioned
earlier.

And we wonder now where does this cowardice, this rise of nationalism come from in our
time? Suppressed as an individual by di erent ideologies and thrown on the fringes of social
movements this person is in fact smashed and lost between confronted ideologies. By the
same token he is immature and incapable of individual rebellion because he does not possess
real intellectual drive for that. In that way this individual has found himself in a crack, in a
limbo, because he is a social being who does not participate in social life. As an individual, he
needs to participate in social life, but his individualism is suppressed in the name of
ideologies. What is le to him in that situation is nothing else but to look for his [End Page 15]
social being somewhere else. The nationalist is a frustrated and confused individual, while
nationalism is a collective expression of frustrated individualism. It is ideology and anti-
ideology at the same time.

(Excerpted from Kis’s book Cas Anatomije

[The Anatomy Lesson], pp. 29–33, Nolit. Beograd, 1978)

Danilo Kis
Danilo Kis (1935–1989), best known abroad for his novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovic, was one of the most eminent
novelists and most daring anti-Stalinist thinkers in the former Yugoslavia. Shortly a er the book was published, the
Yugoslav Writers Union impugned Kis’s reputation by accusing him of plagiarism, a claim politically motivated and
initiated by Serbian nationalists. The author counterattacked by publishing his brilliant collection of polemical essays
The Anatomy Lesson. He lived out the rest of his life in exile in Paris.

Footnotes
1. Kis uses the word “nation” (“narod” in Serbian or Croatian) in terms of ethnos (a group of people bound together by the same ethnic
specifics), not nation in terms of demos (people of di erent ethnic backgrounds).

2. Ginger-Bread Heart is a homemade colorful cookie in the shape of a heart and sold at country fairs by Serbian and Croatian peasants
from Vojvodina and Slovenia. Like Valentine’s Day gi s, it is exchanged as a sign of love.

Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Additional Information
ISSN 1537-9477

Print ISSN 1520-281X

Launched on MUSE 1996-05-01

Open Access No

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