Tuesday, May 22, 2007

THE TWO TOTALITARIANISMS

Zizek :

Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.

More here.

2 Comments:

Blogger Snowball said...

Indeed, but to change the topic slightly (well, to go off topic completely) I thought you might be interested in looking through these...

2:23 PM  
Blogger FraVernero said...

I just LOVE it. Guess I'm gonna have to translate the piece for my own blog in a few days time, when my ideas dry up a bit...

I remember well the Historikerstreit (it was spelled something like that), although not from living it (too young), but from reading it. All those debates by german historians and philosophers sarted by rightist Ernst Nolte's equivalence of fascism and communism. I guess mr. Habermas' arguments won the day for me then, but I find Zizek's view an interesing insight, and probably more marxist and less humanistic-liberal-democratic...

5:53 PM  

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