Interviewer: An old-fashioned cinema, in the proper sense, since recently one tends to associate fascism and sadism, in the name of “retro” or a nostalgic return. Thus Liliana Cavani in The Night Porter and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Salo. Yet this representation is not history. The bodies are dressed up in period costumes. They would have us believe that Himmler’s henchmen correspond to the Duke, the Bishop, and his Excellency in Sade’s text.
Foucault: It’s a complete historical error. Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madmen of the twentieth century but by the most sinister, boring, and disgusting petit-bourgeois imaginable. Himmler was a vaguely agricultural type and married a nurse. We must under-stand that the concentration camps were born from the conjoined imagination of a hospital nurse and a chicken farmer. A hospital plus a chicken yard - that’s the phantasm behind the concentration camps. Millions of people were murdered there, so I don’t say it to diminish the blame of those responsible for it, but precisely to disabuse those who want to superimpose erotic values upon it.
The Nazis were charwomen in the bad sense of the term. They worked with brooms and dusters, wanting to purge society of everything they considered unsanitary, dusty, filthy; syphilitics, homosexuals, Jews, those of impure blood, Blacks, the insane. It’s the foul petit bourgeois dream of racial hygiene that underlies the Nazi dream. Eros is absent. That said, it’s not impossible that locally, within this structure, there were erotic relationships that formed in the bodily confrontation between victim and executioner. But it was accidental.
The problem raised is why we imagine today to have access to certain erotic phantasms through Nazism. Why these boots, caps, and eagles that are found to be so infatuating, particularly in the United States? Is it our incapacity to live out this great enchantment of the disorganized body that we project onto a meticulous, disciplinary, anatomical sadism? Is the only vocabulary that we possess for transcribing the grand pleasure of the body in explosion this sad fable of a recent political apocalypse? Are we unable to think the intensity of the present except as the end of the world in a concentration camp? You see how poor our treasure of images really is! And how urgent it is to fabricate another instead of whining about “alienation” and vilifying the “spectacle.“
yousharknotpass
vaporwave
romaincrisis
gummygunk
kianamaiart
