Abstract

Maciej Nowak

Führer and his Island of Fears. 
Utopia as a Deadly Danger “which never comes” 

The essay looks at what it calls an utopian imagination, as a universal, psychological as well as  political, fantasy, which has always helped man and mankind to keep their mind away from fear and anxiety. The author assumes that anxiety, and the fear of Others “we know not of” (to play upon a Shakespearean note) are inherent to human nature, if only for reasons known to all readers of Freud. One of the ways in which “civilisation” helps individual subjects to deal with fear is that it keeps on updating utopian schemes “on offer,” which usually comes as a visionary text authored by a charismatic dreamer, a prominent writer of his age, or a Führer (a term read Freud-wise) of a group, a  collective body, a whole nation. There are fairly “safe” utopian, or near-utopian narratives, whose character is clearly fictitious; for example the classic utopias (of Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare.) But there are truly perilous visions of “no-places” which in their time made a tremendous impact on minds of multitudes, and seem to have very seriously messed with “real” history. Among the notorious utopias we find  Adolf Hitler’s vision of (post-Nazi) Germany of course, but also ones proper to the, quite authorless, ideological appeals of the 21^st century.