Abstract

A drop of blood drawn from thy country's bosom Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore.—Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry the SixthA system of ethics produced by prohibitions is a community's condition of possibility. What maintains this system is the community's identity, the way members of the group mythically describe and convince themselves through mutual mimesis of their mutual belonging, that is, of their mutual ethics of nonviolence. This maintained space of ethical mutuality is defined against a larger external space of mutual violence.First removed from mutual mimetic violence through prohibitions, community and its self-description as identity are then separated from outsiders through the...