What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is, essentially, its ideology, in the definition Hannah Arendt has given of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling logic of an idea, an idea “by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process.” “The movement of history and the logical process of this notion,” Arendt continues, “are supposed to correspond to each other, so that (...) whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one ‘idea.’”2Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of history on the basis of a single concept—the concept of race, for example, or the concept of class—and insofar as, on the other hand, this ideological explanation or conception of the world seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving neither gaps nor remainders—unlike philosophical thought, from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style, what Arendt calls the “insecurity” of philosophical questioning . 2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of The Literary Absolute and, related to the topic of politics, “The Jewish People Don’t Dream” . Lacoue-Labarthe is also the author of Typography and La Fiction du politique . Nancy has written “Sharing Voices” in Transforming Hermeneutics and La Communauté désoeuvrée . Brian Holmes is a doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui Parle. He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity in Cervantes and Flaubert. (shrink)

The observation that men reveal their distinctive identities as human beings in what they do and say seems neither very original nor very controversial. But consider the following set of implications: that men are more likely to reveal who they uniquely are when they act and speak spontaneously, than when they labor to maintain biological subsistence or work to produce a tangible world of human artifacts; that action and speech together make up a “web of human relationships” that forms the (...) intangible but vital substance of human community; that, paradoxically, when they act and speak in human community men are most truly free and yet least in control of their own destinies; that when deprived, as they can be, of human community men quickly lose the sense of their own reality as well as that of a world experienced in common; that the Athenian citizenry of Pericles’ time, fully aware of all this, constituted the greatest and possibly the last authentically “political” community in Western history; and that Pericles’ faith in the power of the Athenian polis to actualize and to sustain human greatness was, for understandable reasons, so short-lived that political thought and political decision from Plato to the present day might well be regarded as an escape from “politics” altogether. (shrink)