Blindly preserving the state will always ensue in the death of a people. The state is fixing, calcifying, and order-imposing, whereas a living people is only ever underway, caught between the beginning and end of transformation. A people is constant only in its becoming, a state becomes in its constancy. We read the existence of peoples, nationals, back upon the many tribes of Europe, under the idea of the state, and the idea of the state under the contemporary conception of the nation-state. So a people is not only un-identical with itself in the past and future, but also in the present.
The imposition of the state inhibits the development of a people such that it may organize and congeal into a discrete formation. Within this crystalline and quasi-artificial formation of ‘state,’ a people may come to apprehend itself in law, and even mistake itself for the image apprehended.
The state, in naming and making explicit, crystallizes invisible tradition into visible institution and law that ‘citizens’ can touch and grab hold of. While this evolution compels a people to self-consciousness, it divides a people from itself as the cause and end of this transformation. Where law is no longer internal to a people, it must be imposed from without, so the state arrives to aid in a problem of its own making. But so as to not appear as a hostile foreigner, it makes itself familiar.
The nation-state is a composite between the dynamic, pre-reflective becoming of a people and the static, objective quality of self-recognition.
A nation-state must stabilize the movement of a people without grinding it to a halt. The formation of a people requires a state, for a people comes to see itself as a people under the guidance of law.
But in order to naturalize what is only half-natural, the nation state must deploy violence. In this endeavor, the state is always eventually felled by the means of its establishment, where upon a multitude of people scatter out from underneath its corpse.
English
