Faye Jean Pierre: Totalitarni jezici

Jean Pierre Faye: Totalitarian Languages

Critical Consideration of Narrative Economy

The extremely interesting reception of Jean Pierre Faye's book was marked by the statement of French President Francois Mitterrand that it represents one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. The fact that this statement originates from an important European statesman, and not from a philosopher or literary theorist, does not diminish but, on the contrary, increases its significance. Namely, it rarely happens that a recognized statesman draws attention to a philosophical book. The reason why he would do this cannot rest anywhere else than in its social relevance, in the ability to name and recognize some current problems of contemporary society. At the center of Faye's philosophical work is the theory of narrativity. Faye's contribution to this theory consists in the thesis that narrative no longer relies on the crucial Aristotelian true/false distinction. Rather, the narrative is based on an exclusionary relationship to all competing   narratives. Considering  this immanent polemical nature of the narrative, and especially as a historical narrative, Faye aligned himself with the central figures of the so-called of the linguistic turn that developed extremely fruitfully in France starting in the sixties of the last century. Totalitarian languages ​​represents Faye's most significant and well-known book from 1972 (translated into German in 1977). This voluminous work traces the key words of right-wing German politics and culture from the end of the nineteenth century until the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialists to power.  Between the two world wars, the ideological narratives of the extreme right narrated history based on two crucial words:  totalitarian state. Faye extremely patiently and meticulously shows the different contexts and modes of use that originated in the narrative motifs, and ended with the greatest and  most massive destruction in the history of civilization. Faye proves that such a narrative cannot be stopped at the level of mere historical discourse, since it tends by its very nature to become action. In other words, the rhetoric of the radical right shows us how a certain linguistic economy in which words are chosen more than carefully manages to become a reality, to be incorporated into the human life world. To that extent, Fay's capital book represents a criticism of history that cannot be carried out in any other way than by a process that demonstrates how history, by telling stories, realizes itself.