| Abstract: | This study draws upon both Carlo Ginzburg's procedures for establishing and preserving (historical) evidence and Claude Lévi-Strauss' structuralist approach with its analysis of "primitive" mythologies to demonstrate that binary coding of the social domain is an all-pervasive structural principle. Heim's intention in this is to show that (present-day) xenophobia and racism are the products of a phantasm centering around the division of the world into pure and impure. The author brings into alignment collective fantasies about the homogeneity of the "body politic" with a form of primary narcissism which, if it is to preserve the illusion of original purity, is forced to externalize instinctual urges experienced as heterogeneous and unpleasurable and project them onto "foreigners" and things foreign. |
