SOPSTVO U NACIONALNIM I POSTNACIONALNIM KONSTRUKCIJAMA / SELFHOOD IN NATIONAL AND POSTNATIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Abstract

In the paper, I analyze the conceptual and contentual definition of selfhood, its individual and collective component, and its modernist objectivity within ethnic and national identities. As a concrete historically shaped and determined creation, personal selfhood is subject to the dialectic of social reality which in the era of modernity obtains its sociopolitical merit within the nation and its institutional analogue - the national state. On the other hand, postmodern tendencies change the image of selfhood as a coherent and permanently anchored being by focusing on the phenomena of decentralization, fragmentation and heterogeneity. The central thesis of the paper is that the postmodernist image of social reality and the related image of a fragmented personal selfhood cannot eliminate the influence, intensity and efficiency of nations, national identity and nationalism, and in itself is unable to eliminate these modernist determinants from the components of postmodern / post-national individual and collective identities.