By TALES AB' SABER*
The fascist regime always weighs on language and language itself, as it originally weighs on the psyche available to the simplified past of the fascist.
One of the achievements of fascist regimes effectively operating in their world is the production of what George Orwell called newlanguage em Admirable new world. The fascist regime always weighs on language and language itself, as it originally weighs on the psyche available to the simplified past of the fascist. It completes and thickens the relationship of division and power that exists between language and social reality. Fixed by violence and the bullets and bombs of power, in fascism ideology tends to become the part, having the same effect as another thing about the dream, giving language the concreteness of the stone, the one that is thrown at the enemy and the one that crushes and paralyzes the possibility of the circulation of difference.
Throwing stones, beating, torturing or making noise, or banging pots and pans…, to frighten the enemy by evoking a state of primitive war, imaginary or real, are archaeological traces and operations of power, which left the mark of horror that they presupposed in the very language of the future, reducing the known flight of the spirit to the material act over the body of the other. They are traces of the distant past that can return, as memory. the form, of the act and the thing, and not of the sense, work of thought that does not exist there, or here.
The final step of fascist divisions, of their certainties that legitimize violence and extermination, torture and mockery of political adversaries, their mass enjoyment, of their false identity of some kind of superiority, of their practical life that seeks action and strongly refuses any meditated, creative or critical knowledge in any way is a broad downward curvature in the plane of language, the excited charging of words that tends towards the concreteness of their value, the open contempt for other words that must be refused, denied, the displacement of the plane of lexicon and semantics towards another gravitational center whose political nature is interested, immensely sad, melancholy of history, even if excited in its absolute present.
“From 1939 onwards, the racing car was replaced by the tank, and the automobile driver was replaced by the Panzer fighter [tank driver]. (…) For twelve years, the concept and vocabulary of heroism were among the favorite terms, used with greater intensity and selectivity, aiming at a warmongering courage, a bold attitude of fearlessness in the face of any death in combat. It was not in vain that one of the favorite words in the Nazi language was the adjective campfire [combative, aggressive, belligerent], which was new and little used, typical of neo-romantic aesthetes. Crucifixion [warrior] had a very limited meaning, it made one think only of matters of War [war]. It was also a clear and frank adjective, which denounced the desire to fight, the aggressive disposition and the thirst for conquest. Kämpefersch is something else! It reflects in a more generalized way an attitude of spirit and will that in any circumstance aims at self-affirmation through defense and attack, and does not accept renunciation. The abuse of the word campfire corresponds to the excessive, erroneous and proper use of the concept of heroism. (…) From the first day of war until the fall of the Third Reich, all heroism on land, air and sea wore a military uniform. In the first war there was still a civilian heroism behind the military line. front. And now? How long would there be heroism there? How long would there still be civilian life?”[I]
In his study of the degradation and production of language specific to German Nazism and its regime, the first point that Victor Klemperer highlights and recalls is the search for a fusion of the idea of common and unbridled bellicosity, aggressiveness in life, with the broad policy of transforming everything that exists and lives in the world into “war”. Setting up a construction in which war must become total, internal to the subjects, act of subjectivation and being, and the horizon of the entire existing external world, of culture, the world of Nazism was the replacement of civilian life by life as a battle without survivors. “The racing car was replaced by the tank, and the driver by the panzerfahrer". Kämpefersch.
Thus, from the old world of sports and technical spectacle, linked to liberal culture, the everyday world of praise for competition and performance – market and war performance, “whose principle is the same” as Marcuse simply said –, from the pleasure of everyday aggressive vulgarity common in modern life, sublimated in the form of technology itself, the racing car, a phallic object of a pleasure that flies fast and goes ahead, surpassing the culture that follows it irremediably as thrust and as vacuum, progress, Nazi culture definitively removes the weight of individual feat, derealizing it, and forgets it, we could say, concentrating all intensities entirely in the language of the technical feat of the State, of the massive and heavy panzer divisions, of the tanks that occupied immense concrete space in the world, real slow bodies of meaning but totalitarian in the twisting they make of space itself with their presence, immense occupants of vital space also in language itself.
Displacement is expressive, it inhabits the signifiers and syntagmas of life, configuring a spectacular topical, temporal and formal regression within language itself: from the individual, competition, technique and the market, as a common dream of the bourgeois liberal world, to the social mass fused with the State, the concrete occupation of space, war technology and war, as the common spirit of the times.
The restriction and alteration of imaginary life and the universe of available words was a clear political reality of fascism, and from the adventurous openness of the excited world of individual and bourgeois brilliance, we arrived at the closed, invasive, warlike, destructive and heavy state like the German or Italian tank. The life of the spirit, which you valued, is renounced…”, says Klemperer to a friend in the midst of the rise of Nazism, a new convert who justifies everything.
Social semantics and lexicon were altered, in the direction of restriction, organic communion and weight, in addition to bellicosity as a culture. Panzer fighter. Kämpefersch. It was the spirit of the times, of a solution – or dissolution - in violence of the acute crisis of capitalism of the time, which spoke, imprisoning and bringing the words closer to the brazen and direct struggle and the gang in search of confusion and sacrifice, lower and more common. The gang that renounced language.
In his study of the idea of ur fascism, of the conditions of irresponsibility, transcendence and activation of violence present in every historical movement of a fascist type, Umberto Eco also noted something about the life of words in a very authoritarian regime of order and progress, centered on the leader of the State:
“In 1942, at the age of ten, I won first prize in the Ludi Juvenelis (a competition for free participation for young Italian fascists, that is, all young Italians). I had spoken with rhetorical virtuosity on the subject: ‘Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?’ My answer was yes. I was a clever boy. Then, in 1943, I discovered the meaning of the word ‘freedom.’ At that time, ‘freedom’ still meant ‘liberation.’ (…) On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to the announcements read on the radio, fascism had fallen and Mussolini had been arrested. My mother sent me to buy the newspaper. I went to the nearest newsstand and saw that the newspapers were there, but the names were different. Furthermore, after a brief glance at the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one at random and read a message printed on the front page signed by five or six political parties, such as the Christian Democrats, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Action Party, and the Liberal Party. Up until that point in my life I had believed that there was only one party for each country and that in Italy there was only the National Fascist Party. I was discovering that in my country different political games could exist simultaneously. Not only that, but since I was a smart kid, I soon realized that it was impossible for so many parties to have emerged overnight. I understood that they had already existed as clandestine organizations. The message celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, of political association. These words, ‘freedom’, ‘dictatorship’ – my God – were the first time in my life that I had read them. By virtue of these new words I had been reborn as a free Western man.”[ii]
The boy from the Italian countryside – as Fellini also recalls in Amarcord – experiences, in July 1943, a rapid movement contrary to that of the heavy spirit that took over Klemperer's very fixed modern world.
After spending his life under Mussolini's fascist regime, the boy knows how to write well, in fact very well, about the submission of life to the fatherland and the controlling leader. Words and thoughts converge together, in the child, towards power. He knows how to correctly participate in the call freely forced upon every fascist boy, that is, every Italian boy, to reproduce and increase the power of the State and its guide. He knows how to be clever and mobilize language in some way, as he would always know, to recognize and be recognized by the regime that formed him, that formed him as much as his own mother, evoked for a second in the story, a thread of continuity of himself in a world that was revolutionizing and opening up into a historical scenario of possibilities.
However, the future postmodern linguist and novelist was completely unaware of the meaning of certain words in his own language when they were public and political, and he was unaware of the movement of life, of broad aspects of history, images of life, which were elided together with the emptying of life of banned words. An entire semantics of social life had been hidden from him, taken away, an entire material for dreams had been doubly repressed, in his fascist world almost by the nature of things. An entire structure of the emergence of meaning itself was unknown to him. Occupied by another order of dreaming, and nature of desire, which named everything from another place, free forced, in which being Italian was identical to being a fascist, the life of the basic concepts of modern politics, and its words, were esoteric to him.
Their life energies were condensed into the system of meaning of political things in which ten-year-old children had to write in schools throughout Italy about the value of dying for one's country, concentrated in the figure of the leader who enunciates it with his own body. Once again, the strongly restricted meanings, much less than a capacity to dream, openly brought subjectivity closer to the capacity to die, and to kill... The fixed dream of the words emanating from the body of the leader and of the political project extended in culture dissipates broader clouds of meaning, of beaches and passages of political dynamics, of images, of rights, of experiences, but also of the very name of the lost rights and no longer dreamed of. This destruction, forced freely, also constituted a prison in the very order of words, as the linguist boy makes clear.
In addition to direct violence, the political system that narrows the gaps between the public sphere and the excited arm of those who beat, shoot, torture and kill, the fascist wanted to imprint on the field of public representation a set of words that approximate the very thing they represent, while also extirpating, like a butcher surgeon of the symbolic, worlds and more worlds of possibilities of meaning and experience, which fade away together with the programmed death of the other in culture. The programmatic culture of death and extermination is a culture of the death of words, and with them, of meanings.
Freedom of expression, of the press, of political association, multiple parties, a public space conceived as plural, of multiple simultaneous games and occurring in multiple social temporalities. It was into this otherwise formed space that the fascist boy was suddenly thrown. It must have all been dizzying, a wave of eroticism in culture that brought back words and ways of living. that were under fascist occupation. Yes, because we have known since Sade that the great machinery necessary for sadistic enjoyment, its cathedral of possession and torture, is merely ancillary, necessary, for the control and absolute use of the other's body: words coincide with the torture machine that coincides with fascist enjoyment. What would have been the impact of a certain idea of freedom, in the sense of the possibility of life moving in various points and systems of meaning, political parties and zones of language, versus the term, also non-existent in the system of social restriction of fascist force, “dictatorship”?
On the one hand, Eco describes a social decompression, an explosion of life systems and language, other bets on the political field, other desires, articulated to the idea of a social field free. Another production of life, other words. The weight of the State leader, of its desire for death restricting the name of things that would exist without it, of its universal war tank of meaning, of its culture of insult, bellicosity and organicity – we saw it well in Amarcord, with a sign of freedom and a posteriori ridicule – of a sense of historicity in which many agents dispute the meaning of human things, which should gain a point in dialectics, which implies their real openness to history. Dictatorship, freedom.
We can clearly see in the story how fascist culture is the negative realized of a space of life understood as multiplicity, of the minimum plurality of liberal rights coordinated by class society, to what could even become the maximum plurality “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, of a virtual democratic socialism realized. Thus, in fact, post-war Italian cinema was popular, free, open to the streets, humanist and revolutionary. If its real socialist hope was blocked in the process of redemocratization aimed at the world market – which led Pasolini to speak of a new fascism at the end of the 1960s, consumer fascism –His strength of experience and his desiring value of humanity in fact revolutionized the world of cinema, and world cinema, in the 1950s and 1960s. Eco gives us the measure of the resubjectivation of the strong expansion of the world of words, its rapid unfolding of the cultural plane in its new terms, which represent public and political practices, the same phenomenon of marvelous formal and democratic humanist expansion that we see in life in post-war Italian cinema. The little boy experienced the same emotion and expansion of life that we see, the very form, in a film by Rossellini or Sica, which told the same story. A cinema that expanded with such force and in such a way that it created, from its anti-fascist expansion, all the national and modern cinemas of the world, from the 1950s and 1960s onwards.
***
Let us consider the strongest impact of this difference, between the culture of concentration and weight, organized for war, and the culture of multiplicity, organized for the modern idea of some freedom. Dreams can tell us even better the nature of this political relationship, of shock, on the symbolic body of a person in a culture that is restricted to the political violence that surrounds it. The political and concretely social, historical layers that always inhabit human dreaming – as Roger Bastide and also Theodor Adorno already told us, and as Freud was the first to show, in the series of political dreams of The interpretation of dreams,known as their Roman dreams – at this critical historical moment they are represented even more clearly.
Because the dream is the simple limit of resistance, the source of psychic mobility, the only remainder of the idea of freedom, what the fascist aims at is in fact to dominate it, paralyze it, reconfigure it even as a form: from its fundamental civilizing negotiation, from the metaphor, distance and poetry of dreaming, from the human exile dreamed into meaning, to the direct action of discharge and refusal of the existence of the other. Kämpefersch. One of the anti-Nazi Germans, who were forced to live under Hitler, dreamed in 1934:
“The SA puts barbed wire on the windows of hospitals. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t allow this in my section if they came with their barbed wire. But in the end I let them do it and I stand there, a caricature of a doctor, while they break the windows and turn a hospital room into a concentration camp with barbed wire. Even so, I get fired. But I get called back to take care of Hitler, because I’m the only one in the world who can do it: I’m so ashamed of my pride that I start to cry.”[iii]
The fascist system of language and culture is a system of actions. A system of active occupations of the meaning of the space of public symbolic life, of subjectivations and, ultimately, of dreams themselves. The most intimate, and that which resists, like pain, all violence. Every lie and every fascist language is an occupation of the real, a change in the meaning of things in the world: barbed wire on the windows of the hospital, the hospital becomes a concentration camp, revealing all the aggressiveness and politics that it usually hides and sublimates in the order of the liberal world. The symbolic field, the space of movement and life of dreams themselves, is invaded by the very thing of a culture that becomes barbed and violent in expression. A thing penetrates the space of the symbol. In the end, it is Hitler himself who makes demands of the dreamer, because in fact it is the fascist who makes demands on simply everything.
The culture of fascist lies is a culture of inversion of the value and meaning of things themselves, an invasive and violent action so that things change their name, so that they are no longer what they are. Not out of freedom, they must change their substance, not out of eroticism or creation. But out of a desire for power. So that hospitals become prisons, and “liberal professionals” or public men serve the royal power, align themselves with its desire, become “Hitler’s doctors”. The systematic public lie of power insistently seeks the active invasion of concrete spaces, the destruction of borders significant of the ever-limping democracy, in order to degrade the nature of existing objects, of things and their meanings, in favor of its core of strength, pure producer of power. As we shall see, the very significant limits of words are in crisis. They are in fact being dissolved, to gain a new configuration from the structure of fascist desire, which penetrates the world, which most break the crystals of words than respects any thought that can actually cross them. Lying is action, occupation, and the occupation of things and from the space of politics will generate the new culture of lying, with its new terms: new language.
The example of the dreamer is dramatic. He stages the political and cultural terror in the face of the social space that becomes the weight of the fascist production machine. Like the tank and the bellicosity that took over culture, the hospital also became a war machine, and the liberal subject of some democratic personality feels the complete invasion of his subjective space by the same heavy forms. He still resists, but he knows he is taken by assault by the order of violence, which is practical, which has gained strength in culture and which is a dream. Personal and subjective resistance is at the limit, at the frontier, against the transformation of the traumatized dream itself; there is no way to stop, in the dream and in life, the transformation of the hospital into a concentration camp SA. Before being expelled from the space of violence, the desire to deny it, before being fired, the dreamer becomes a caricature of a doctor: the movement of the occupation of the world and of oneself by terror is the movement of the derealization of oneself. The self and its illusions in the liberal order become progressively irrelevant, practically use. The circuit of the language of power has appropriated the public space, and comes from the whole, from the continent of things and symbols, intensely into the subject, who is destructured by it, like a psycho-ideological poison, like space thing, real, against the dream itself. Her lie is effective because it is real action, real power. Power to deform things themselves. She lies about the hospital, but she also doesn't lie anymore, because the hospital is no longer a hospital, it is a prison and a field of fascist violence. Like culture. And the subject who dreams? He is not a fascist as long as he is still terrified, recognizes violence and absurdity, and wavers before the risk of his own totalitarian adaptation.
Subjectivity is under siege, due to the conversion required by the culture of lies and violence, which comes from the horizons of the world. The subject will have to decide between the truth of his own negativity and the conversion to the war machine, aggressiveness, contempt and power. Will he become Hitler's doctor? Due to the identifying pressure of the whole, and the principle of conservation, will his desire be crushed by the force of life and death, the terror of lies, very active in fascist power? Will he be converted to the symbolic desire for power, through the action of public lies, concrete threats and state power? The dream asks the political question from the root. The question of the self in the face of identification with the totalitarian element of the whole.
In dreams, that man on the border of all historical violence against himself swore he wouldn't. But at the end of the dream, after being expatriated from the culture of power, because he still knows what a hospital is and what a prison is, he is summoned, he has to come face to face with Hitler. There is desire and there is trauma in this relationship. This is how one confronts fascist culture, head on and negatively. He will have to look at the reality of power, because it is no longer denyable, in any way. The tragic and agonistic limit of fascism and subjectivity is set there: he is the only one in the world who can save Hitler, that is, from a political point of view, accept his machine of violence and lies. And as a doctor, who is the only one who can save the dictator, he is also the one who can let him die... By completely converting culture into war, the fascist demands from each one a life and death decision before himself.
This is the greatest horror, the ultimate paradox for those who see life as violence and contempt for others: only war liquidates, or transforms, those who make life a real war. A war with crafts of fascism, which implies denying it at its root and forever. A war outside the cold war of the fascist dream. Another formation. The dream shows how difficult this social work is in itself.
The dream of the non-Nazi German doctor puts into action in the space of his own subjectivity that ridiculous political cultural tragedy of the imprisonment of the world, experienced and understood by Victor Klemperer. “How much longer would there be civilian life? The Doctrine of total war turned against its creators in a terrible way: everything is a war spectacle, military heroism can be found in every factory, in every basement. Children, women and the elderly die the same heroic death, as if they were on the battlefield, often wearing the same uniform designed for young soldiers at the front.”[iv] Civilian life had become the norm of the limiting life of authoritarian, aggressive and warlike passion. In fact, Hannah Arendt recalled the hateful degradation of all European public life into a toxic air of distrust, of generalized contempt, which, after the absolute catastrophe of the evil of nationalist imperialism in the First World War, took over Europe, and prepared the profound ground for the rise of fascist totalitarianism. And the mobilized, clothed, uniformed men, invaded by the structure of desires of the world of power itself, no longer died in their own way, as Freud said in his great metapsychological commentary on the effects of the First World War on everyone.[v], but they died in the manner of the desire for power. Civilian life became nothing more than the hell of its own suppression. And the generalization of the culture of enmity. The tank driver, the common aggressiveness and bellicosity that walked the streets and in the beer halls, the hospital as a prison and death in a state of permanent war. The death of culture, and death as culture.
Charlotte Beradt continues her reading of the doctor's dream, paradigmatic of subjective degradation and incorporation into power, conversion to power, which continues to be dreamed by the tormented dreamer: “The doctor woke up completely exhausted, as often happens when one cries in a dream. During the night, he thought about the dream and found its pressing cause, also very enlightening for the general picture: the day before, one of his assistants had gone to work at the clinic wearing an SA uniform, and he, despite being angry, did not protest.”
There is the invasion and degradation of civil space by desire and language, by the fascist spirit. The young Nazi doctor, in his paramilitary uniform, already occupies, with defiance and arrogance, certainly defiant and aggressive, the space neutral, the liberal social space and its order of values, the space of medical life, which, in theory, should not be surrounded by politics. Not in a saturated, uniformized way, tending to transform life into a party, and relations into a constant and universal struggle for power. For how long would there still be civil life?
From the fascist's point of view, as he advocates the total occupation of space, time is also running out: for no longer must there be a civil life depoliticized from the total struggle, from the politics of hatred, which must occupy every hospital. Beradt continues:
“He falls asleep again and dreams: ‘I am in a concentration camp, but all the prisoners are doing very well, attending dinners and watching plays. I think that what one hears about the camps is greatly exaggerated, and then I look in the mirror: I am wearing the uniform of a concentration camp doctor and special high boots, which shine so brightly. I lean against the barbed wire and begin to cry again.’ // This doctor needs the word caricature to define himself – and that is what he is, a caricature drawn precisely and coldly with a pencil on his interior, in an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable. In the first dream, he sees the danger of silence and the relationship between inaction and crime. In the second dream, under the motto ‘Everything is false’, he has become an accomplice of the forces he hates: his image in the mirror contradicts the image he wants to have of himself, yet his high boots shine temptingly. Full of shame, he leads himself, in both dreams, to a category in which he does not want to be: at the same time, full of pride, he fulfills the desire to be included. // The doctor also says that, in the first dream, he had obstinately occupied himself with the word Barbed Wire [barbed wire] (an element that plays such a prominent role in both his dreams; first he thought of Krachelstaat, then in Drachelstaat [words that do not exist in German, but which revolve around Staat, that is, State…], but despite all the Joycene deconstruction of the word, he did not think of Dragonfly [literally 'dragon seed', an expression meaning 'apple of discord'; it is Bergman's 'serpent's egg'], a word he wanted to use to show the dangerous consequences that barbed wire and broken glass could have for the visually impaired. // As is well known, the story of the SA and the broken glass took place many years later, in 1938, on Kristallnacht. This event featured details that seemed to have been taken from an ophthalmologist’s dream: when the SA members smashed the windows of all the Jewish shops, they also broke the windows of a small shop in West Berlin owned by a blind man, who was dragged out of his bed and forced to walk in his pajamas over the broken glass. Here we see once again that these dreams remained in the realm of the possible, or rather, the impossible, which was about to become reality.”[vi]
The doctor, invaded and terrorized by Nazism in his own dreams, in a politics of intimacy and the unconscious, projected a historical knowledge about the future of the fascist thing itself. Because it is a fixed formula of history, a transfiguration of historical reason into the order of nature, said Hannah Arendt, and thus can be foreseen in detail. As the concentration camps were planned to the maximum, in detail. Charlotte Beradt concludes, the doctor's dream is a work of a memory of the future.
One of the memory of the future, a desire and a faith, the ultimate impulse to dominate contingency and determine all possible parameters of reality, transform it by force, “by the universal powers of hell” said the Latin American dictator, with his own type of fascism, figured in the dream, nightmare, of earth in trance. An determined memory, fixed to stone, sticks, bullets and atomic bomb, from the future. Exactly the image, the memory of the future, like someone who no longer knows whether he is dreaming, delirious or living a nightmare, that Wilfred Bion formed for the first time for psychoanalysis, when he recalled in a novel from the end of his life the hallucinatory experience of having driven an English war tank, a machine for protecting and destroying the masses at the same time, of excited heroism of modern imperial capitalist states, in an extermination camp for two million young people dead, on the plains of Belgium at the heart of the First World War. Perhaps not by chance, Walter Benjamin insisted so much, in his visionary writings and strong thinking style, that the anti-fascist dream should be by nature a dialectical inquiry into the past, in fact, as Freud wanted, and not any order to determine the future.
*Tales Ab´Sáber He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Unifesp. He is the author of, among other books, The Anthropophagic Soldier: Slavery and Non-Thought in Brazil (Hedra). [https://amzn.to/4ay2e2g]
An earlier version of this study was published in Michel Temer and common fascism, New York: Routledge, 2017.
Notes
[I] Victor Klemperer, LTI, the language of the third reich, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 42.
[ii] Umberto Eco, “Ur Fascismo (Eternal Fascism)”, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/livros_online/NFN0ye-94xA
[iii] Charlotte Beradt, Dreams in the Third Reich, New York: Routledge, 2017, p. 78.
[iv] Victor Klemperer, op. cit..
[v] Beyond the pleasure bases, 1920.
[vi] Charlotte Berardt, on. cit., p. 79, 80.
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