Nazism

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees the singularity of Nazism not in atrocity, which is present in every era, but in the fact that it arises within a civilized and refined age. He connects it to a "destruction of reason", that is, an effort to destroy the point at which people were beginning to move beyond the substantial and the magical. To rebuild the unity of a wounded self, everything becomes permitted, including horror. He also traces the origin of certain notions: the notion of the subhuman comes from the American Stoddard and reaches the Nazis through Rosenberg1. It applies to the Slavs, communist or not, who are meant for slavery. Nazi discourse targets "Judeo-Bolshevism", two terms the Nazis treat as inseparable. The Nazis also wanted to replace the Jacobin state with agencies2. In this framework, the individual has rights only through productivity, and non-productive people are judged unworthy of life3. Finally, he reads Heidegger's notions, such as being and Dasein, as coded designations of Nazi political realities4.

1. 1U for Übermensch4 Jan 2015 · 2:59
2. 2War, neo-fascism: libertarian liberalism3 Mar 2023 · 16:49
3. 3Heidegger, or panzer-philosophy21 May 2021 · 15:06
4. 4#7 Harnessed to confinitude5 May 2020 · 58:47

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.