Fascist Mythologies The History and Politics of Unreason in Borges, Freud, and Schmitt
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Federico Finchelstein is professor of history at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. His books include A Brief History of Fascist Lies (2020), From Fascism to Populism in History (2017), The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century Argentina (2014), and Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919â1945 (2010).Scratching the skin of second nature we find the basic animal instinct that seals the unity of the hordeâthis is the primordial face of fascism. In this timely and needed book, Federico Finchelstein brings to surface through a compelling study of myth in politics the psycho-aesthetical forging of the ideology of fascism, something we believed buried forever under the butchery of extermination camps and politics as celebration of violence.
- Nadia Urbinati, author of <i>Me The People: How Populism Transforms Democracy</i>,
Federico Finchelstein reinterprets the relationship between fascism and myth through different but extremely interesting perspectives: Freudâs psychoanalysis, Borgesâs literature, and Schmittâs political theory. Solidly documented, conceptually innovative and elegantly written, this book is a gem of intellectual history.
- Enzo Traverso, author of <i>Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory</i>,
Finchelstein's book on Borges, Freud, and Schmitt provides insightful analyses of these three significant figures in the history of modern thought. His valuable focus is the bearing of their work on the approach of fascism to such crucial problems as mythology, ideology, power, leadership, death, and violenceâproblems that unfortunately are pertinent not only to their time but to our own as well.
- Dominick LaCapra, author of <i>Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts</i>,
Finchelstein's excellent new book explores a word we might take for granted: mythology. This word links politics with religion and with literature. Thanks to <i>Fascist Mythologies</i>, readers will appreciate the importance, the 'sacredness' we can sense in the pre-fascist use of the term, meaning the autonomy of a narrative imagination beyond material experience. Bringing creative writer Jorge Luis Borges into the critique of fascism, to accompany political theorists and psychoanalysts, adds a liberatory dimension to thinking about the social pathology of fascism and a possible route for therapy. It is to safeguard and to cultivate the practice of creative thinking, to recognize that it shouldn't flatten into representing the 'real' as the fascists had done. The arts can again become a laboratory for thinking beyond what exists, and resisting immediate appropriations of new narratives. Literature can again stimulate critical thinking. And Federico Finchelstein's book is an important stimulus to get us working in this critical and imaginative direction.
- Doris Sommer, author of <i>The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities</i>,
In <i>Fascist Mythologies</i>, Finchelstein brings together three very different authors: the father of psychoanalysis, the greatest Latin American writer, and the legal scholar who became the Nazi ideologue. Yet, as each one of them is analyzed, we begin to see how power and myth are inextricably related in fascism.
- MarĂa PĂa Lara, author of <i>The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization</i>,