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What is it about nationalism that lends itself to such continuous permutations and repetitions, to its mobility? Why are “we” continuously investing in it despite its failures and indeed its darker side of exclusions, xenophobia, and even genocide? This chapter reflects on the power and form of nationalism in (late) modernity by offering a reading of nationalism’s recurrences and its affective appeal. Specifically, this chapter develops three mutually enabling machineries that drive and animate projects of nationalism. These are as follows: (1) the ontological fissure at the heart of the nation/state and indeed the national subject/ object (the split subject), (2) the phantasmatic nature of national narratives of utopian closure and wholeness, and (3) the jouissance (enjoyment) in nationalism, namely the temporal nature of affective belonging and the sense that this mode of enjoyment was lost and/or stolen by an other.