Totalitarianism

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches totalitarianism through the Kantian category of totality. Totality is the synthesis of unity and plurality, and it is what distinguishes a people from a crowd1. He then turns the concept around, against the definition derived from Arendt: Nazism and the Stalinist purges are not the rule of a whole that crushes the part. They are regimes in which a part (race, single party, single way of thinking) claims to speak in the name of the whole2. In his view, the concept serves to discredit any opposition to capitalism and drowns Nazism in the mass. In 2019, the European Parliament resolution that places Nazism and communism on the same footing leads him to read Thomas Mann, for whom this equation is already fascist. He also shows, through "Judeo-Bolshevism", that the Nazi delusion has its own logic. He links the phenomenon to the myth of Procrustes, a figure of formalism that Hegel uses to analyse the Terror2. He also links it to the negative freedom described by Hegel, which, once turned towards action, becomes a fury of destruction3.

1. 1L'île du Peuple: the debate23 Jun 2015
2. 2#1.6 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015
3. 3#5.2 bis Questions (Facebook Live)6 Dec 2018

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.