Emotional foundational- ism? Critical remarks on affect and collective emotion in the phenomenological- psychoanalytic account of ethno-national identity

In this critical account of Baldacchino’s broad proposal for an emotion-focused phenomenological-psychoanalytic account of ethno-national identity in his article ‘The eidetic of belonging’, I focus my evaluation on three central features that might, even when treated separately, advance contemporary understanding of group self-conceptions and emotion. The first is that affect (emotion or sentiment) should play a central role in understanding ethno-national identity. The second is that collective emotion should be prominent as a kind of social glue in the formation and maintenance of ethno-national identity (including complex relations between different ethno-national groups). The third is that a psychoanalytic phenomenology of collective emotion addresses limitations that beset conceptions of ethno-national affective subjectivity: particularly, the idea that it is useful to replace representations of irrational and dangerous ethno-national emotion with a new and elaborate theoretical vocabulary of relationships between ego-objects and we-images. While all three positions can be argued to be present already in the ethnonational identity literature, it is the arguments supporting each feature and an evaluation of the resulting gestalt that will be critically examined to determine Ethnicities 11(1) 123–130 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1468796810388705 etn.sagepub.com