Abstract
The question of Europe has been raised continually. Various candidates, from that of Roman law in ancient times to the current economic and regulatory union of today have been tried.
Such bureaucratic solutions, however, have not proved sufficient. They regulate external relations, but do not touch what is within.
This, however, is the difficulty: how do we understand nations and their relations from within? How are we to understand the embodied "subjectivity" of nations? In this article, I use Levinas' conception of corporalité- (Leiblichkeit in German) to answer such questions. My claim is that it permits the extension of subjectivity to a national level.
Such an extension, I will argue, is crucial for understanding the group of nations that we call Europe. It is what allows us to catch sight of Europe's particular identity.