Повний текст доступний у читальному залі "Фонду Президентів України"

This book is about the construction of the archaic within the modern, and the fabrication of the swastika as a sign of identity in an era when personal and collective identities were being rapidly displaced. The construction of the swastika as the icon of a supposedly immemorial and indivisible race identity began in the mid-nineteenth century and reached its height in the Nazi period in Germany; its echoes are unfortunately still with us, despite the fact that the gulf between the representation of identity and its quotidian social dissolution grows ever wider. High on the list of the duplicities attributable to National Socialism was its use of the swastika as an emblem of the sense of self-definition and community which capitalism was rapidly eroding. In fact Nazism, under the sign of the swastika, subsumed the ‘organic’ and historical model of the nation state within a totalitarian scheme based on the expansionist and market-led notions of territory and social geography which had succeeded the organic model. This book shows that a similar paradox also informed the construction of the swastika as a sign of the ‘Aryan race’ in the nineteenth century. The myth of an Aryan race re-assembled the archaic in the image of the modern, and its mythology of structure was derived from the study of Indo-European comparative linguistics, which also presaged the ahistoric, structural and modernist linguistics of Saussure. ‘Aryan man’ was a creature born of abstraction and deracination; and the swastika, a globally distributed mark with no discernible point of origin, was his heraldic device. In the nineteenth century, the swastika was used as both Aryan sign and Aryan evidence, place and race in one, and was adopted by Nazism in the twentieth century in its violent erasure of the historical links between people, place and praxis. From 1889 to the present, the display of the Aryan swastika as a symbolic locus, identifying mark or point of reference has also signalled dislocation, displacement and at worst, the Nazi terror.

Кл.слова:
знакові системи -- іконічність -- індуїзм -- нацизм -- ідеологізація