Jean-Luc Nancy e Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe - O Mito Nazi

The Holocaust is a consequence—a strictly logical one—of Western Reason. Such is the central thesis that this brief, immense book enunciates.

The importance of this book for understanding Nazism (within the "general phenomenon of totalitarian ideologies") lies in thinking about it from the perspective of identity. That is, the relationship between the proper and the improper—a relationship constitutive of any identification, whether individual or collective. In the case of Nazism, that is, specifically German totalitarianism, that relationship is expressed in the element of race, leading the authors to propose a first definition of Nazism as a "racist ideology."

By dismantling the opposition between mythos and logos, this book concretizes Hannah Arendt's intuition about the eidos of an ideology: the logic of an idea that seeks to explain the totality of history by conforming the world to its image. The authors thus reject as dangerous and simplistic the characterization of Nazism as a purely irrational phenomenon, demonstrating how it imposed itself through a conscious and deliberate exploitation of the reflexive and mimetic movements mobilized by the exemplary function of myth. Consequently, in this metaphysical context of analysis, myth is then taken not as a particular content (this or that Germanic mythology), but as a means of identification—of an individual or of an entire people. This is why the book considers the (Nazi) myth in the singular, without dwelling on the myths or mythologies that fueled and strengthened the Nazi movement. [Sara Belo and Tomás Maia]

That we should always have certain accounts to render and to render to ourselves, that we should always be indebted or obliged to memory, conscience, and analysis, is what a majority of our contemporaries recognize. However, their reasons and their ends are not always very clear or very satisfactory. There is a call for vigilance against possible resurgences—this is the motto of "never again!" And, in fact, the activity or agitation of the far-right in recent years, the phenomenon of "revisionism" regarding the Shoah, the ease with which neo-Nazi groups emerge in the former East Germany, the "fundamentalisms," nationalisms, and purisms of all kinds, from Tokyo to Washington and from Tehran to Moscow—all this contributes to demanding this vigilance. [Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy]