Anatomy of the fascist language: "Madrid, de Corte a checa", by Agustín de Foxá

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the linguistic materialization of Agustín de Foxá fascist thought in his work Madrid, de Corte a checa (1938). With this aim, we will follow the studies about nazi language written by Klaus Theweleit and its aplication made by Jonathan Littell to Léon Degrelle’s texts. The premise is that the psychopathology of the fascist soldier has an alternative estructure to the one proposed by Sygmund Freud. Instead of that, it has the shape of a shell constantly menaced by the drives of desire. Therefore, the fascist externalise his intimate problems projecting his hate against everything that fluids, like feminine and liquid as destabilizer elements. Agustín de Foxá was a falangist writer ideologically very close to european fascism, that is, as a response to the extended feeling of moral decay and a specific interpretation of Modernity, according to Roger Griffin. In this way, he is an uncommon example within the political tendencies of Spanish Francoism and deserves to be considered separately because fascism, in Theweleit’s words, is a «modality of production of the real». With this we refer to their organizational nature of reality from their own psychopathological needs, and how the affect the articulation of a fascist language in relation to the male and female characters’ description, and the brutalization of the republicans as a form of war legitimation.