Fascist Mythologies : The History and Politics of Unreason in Borges, Freud, and Schmitt

For fascism, myth was reality--or was realer than the real. Fascist notions of the leader, the nation, power, and violence were steeped in mythic imagery and the fantasy of transcending history. A mythologized primordial past would inspire the heroic overthrow of a debased present to achieve a violently redeemed future. What is distinctive about fascist mythology, and how does this aspect of fascism help explain its perils in the past and present? Federico Finchelstein draws on a striking combination of thinkers--Jorge Luis Borges, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Schmitt--to consider fascism as a form of political mythmaking. He shows that Borges's literary and critical work and Freud's psychoanalytic writing both emphasize the mythical and unconscious dimensions of fascist politics. Finchelstein considers their ideas of the self, violence, and the sacred as well as the relationship between the victims of fascist violence and the ideological myths of its perpetrators. He draws on Freud and Borges to analyze the work of a variety of Latin American and European fascist intellectuals, with particular attention to Schmitt's political theology. Contrasting their approaches to the logic of unreason, Finchelstein probes the limits of the dichotomy between myth and reason and shows the centrality of this opposition to understanding the ideology of fascism. At a moment when forces redolent of fascism cast a shadow over world affairs, this book provides a timely historical and critical analysis of the dangers of myth in modern politics. "The Myth of Fascism argues that fascism can be seen as a new and murderous form of modern political myth. Freud, Borges, and Schmitt linked violent desires with the return of the historically repressed, that is, with myths repressed at an early stage of a society's development. Fascism enacted mythology in its longing for a "remote past," a simpler time superior to the present. The legitimacy of myth became the foundation for modern politics: fascist regimes considered themselves as actualizations of classical violent myths that thrived in the unconscious and that moved throughout history but also transcended it; myth, not history, legitimated violent actions. The book delineates the political and theoretical paths that led these thinkers to ponder the conceptual and practical relations between the victims of trauma and the ideological myths of their perpetrators and argues that their theories can help us reevaluate the sources of modern political violence"-- Provided by publisher