Claim Details

Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, ... can already be interpreted as the 'irrational' excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a 'political aesthetic of death' at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn't been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism's cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that.