Page 106 [106]
processes the information sent by the receptor to the brain and
draws conclusions rooted precisely in a cultural, historical, and
of course emotional background. Then I hear that the person in
question speaks differently. It is also a shift towards reflexivity.
Nazi ideology is the best example to show that the other does not
always live far away. This goes well beyond rejecting the other,
and even marking the other as a stranger. This is the enemy, the
radical notion of the alien.
The enemy. The enemy must be erased, must be excised, or else
they will destroy us. Fascism was the victory of doing nothing.
It was the revolution of failures,* those without talent or accom¬
plishments. Illiterate writers without self-awareness, painters who
could not even draw, engineers who failed at color and proportion,
stuttering actors, etc. achieved positions of power and declared
what was art and what was not, what was science and what was not,
and what culture was at all and what it should be. The alien is an
enemy. Whether internal or external, the important thing is that
it exist. In fact, the alien is degenerate. Their art ís even more so."
But how does the other become an alien and then an enemy? Let
us look at Shakespeare, who can serve as a serious starting point
for everything. In Othello, Brabantio says:
Whether a maid so tender, fair and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunned
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou, to fear, not to delight.
(Act I, Scene Il)
47 see note 51.
48 The term (degenerate) achieved its racist connotation in Joseph Arthur
de Gobineau. M.S. Nordau used later this concept (Die Entartung, Berlin,
1893) but not in a racist sense. The Nazis defined “degenerate art” (Entar¬
tete Kunst) for the public at the 1937 exhibition at Munich. A list of these:
https://opendatacity.github.io/taz-entartete-kunst/