Division of man, division of men. Why is the territory a strong component of contemporary collective identity?

When it comes to differentiation between human groups, one of the main features of Western culture is the importance of the spatial divide. The invention of nations, that lasted four centuries of wars from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, speaks for that. The fact that claims for local identity (neo-regionalism and nationalism) have such a success nowadays, reveals that this feature is still quite alive. Louis Dumont's theory about individualism explains the long run contestation of pre-existent collective authorities, and the rise of the general ideology of the individual. Jacques Lacan and contemporary psychoanalysts who work on the links between psyche and society, go further. They shed light on the recurrent call into question of institutions, on the overwhelming power of the individual and on the protest for identity. According to Lacan the subject is structurally divided, the price for denying it is the overwhelming importance given to social demarcations, namely territorial demarcations. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.