Translated by Brian Holmes
In The Nazi Myth Lacoue-Labarthe together with Jean-Luc Nancy give us one of the most important work on understanding the nature of Fascism and Nazism generating what they call a “fusion of politics and art,” or as they also put it, “the production of the political as a work of art.”
We have only sought to unfold a specific logic, and thus we have no other conclusions to draw. We wish only to underline just how much this logic, with its double trait of the mimetic will-to-identity and the self-fulfillment of form, belongs profoundly to the mood or character of the West in general, and more precisely, to the fundamental tendency of the subject, in the metaphysical sense of the word. Nazism does not sum up the West, nor represent its necessary finality. But neither is it possible to simply push it aside as an aberration, still less as a past aberration. A comfortable security in the certitudes of morality and of democracy not only guarantees nothing, but exposes one to the risk of not seeing the arrival, or the return, of that whose possibility is not due to any simple accident of history. An analysis of Nazism should never be conceived as a dossier of simple accusation, but rather as one element in a general deconstruction of the history in which our own provenance lies.
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