Description
Book SynopsisFederico 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. At a moment when forces redolent of fascism cast a shadow over world affairs, this book provides a timely critical analysis of the dangers of myth in modern politics.
Trade ReviewScratching the skin of second nature we find the basic animal instinct that seals the unity of the horde—this 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
Me The People: How Populism Transforms DemocracyFederico Finchelstein reinterprets the relationship between fascism and myth through different but extremely interesting perspectives: Freud’s psychoanalysis, Borges’s literature, and Schmitt’s political theory. Solidly documented, conceptually innovative and elegantly written, this book is a gem of intellectual history. -- Enzo Traverso, author of
Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and MemoryFinchelstein'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 violence—problems that unfortunately are pertinent not only to their time but to our own as well. -- Dominick LaCapra, author of
Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, PastsFinchelstein's excellent new book explores a word we might take for granted: mythology. This word links politics with religion and with literature. Thanks to
Fascist Mythologies, 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
The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public HumanitiesIn
Fascist Mythologies, 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. -- María Pía Lara, author of
The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of SecularizationTable of ContentsPreface
Introduction
1. Freud, Fascism, and the Return of the Myth
2. Borges and Fascism as Mythology
3. Borges and the Persistence of Myth
4. A Fascist History: Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Myth
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
