Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Description

Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts. This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples. Cover Contents Preface to the Anniversary Edition Acknowledgments A Note to Readers Prologue 1. The Nation's Dream-Work The Great Wall of China The Nationalization of Imagined Communities National Sovereignty as Heteronomy The Permutations of Belief The Nation as Dream The Fantasy of Nationality A Theoretical Interlude: "The Burrow" The Topographic Desire (To Dream Up the Native) 2. The Formal Imagination, I: The Back Roads of Development from Enlightenment to Bureaucracy Toward a History of Discontinuity Facing the Curse of "Underdevelopment": Communal Practices Facing the Curse of "Underdevelopment": Clientelist Theories Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Modernization Thesis Against Administrative Culture: The Task of Reeducation The Predicament of Customary Culture: From Balkan Autonomy to National Bureaucracy 3. The Formal Imagination, II: Natural History and National Pedagogy—The Case of Korais Korais in Context Philosophy, Language, and Revolution Philosophy as Pharmacology Excursus 1. Subversive Affi nities: Enlightenment/Fracture 4. The Punishment of Philhellenism The Disturbance of Bildung Travelers and Philologists Fallmerayer, or the Misfortunes of Ancestry Excursus 2. Of Modern Hellenes in Europe 5. The Phantasms of Writing, I: Makriyiannis and the Miracles of National Memory The Salvaging of Discourse and the Profi ts of Salvation The Politics of Memory Visions and Miracles of Writing The Aesthetic Technology of the National 6. The Phantasms of Writing, II: Nostalgia for Utopia— the Idolatries of Seferis 7. Homologia/Apologia: The Writing of National History The New Rules of the Game: Rousseau's Confessions Confessing to Oblivion Michelet's Prefaces A National Philosophy of History Secondary Revision—Time and the Real Excursus 3. On the Catachresis of Otherness Works Cited Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z