The violence of purity

The dream of purity haunts Western thought like a beautiful poison: the more we pursue the fantasy of an untainted subject, the more violence we inflict on the messy reality of human existence. This is no accident of philosophy but its founding gesture: the belief that somewhere, beneath the chaos of experience, lies a pure, essential self waiting to be uncovered. Every attempt to reach this mythical purity leaves a trail of broken bodies and shattered souls.

The metaphysics of the pure subject operates through a double violence: first by declaring impurity a deviation to be corrected, then by making this correction an ethical imperative. We see this logic at work everywhere: in education systems that standardize minds, in social programs that normalize behavior, in cultural ideals that pathologize difference. The pursuit of purity always requires the elimination of what is deemed impure.

The true horror lies not in our failure to achieve this pure subject but in the devastation created by the endless pursuit of this impossible ideal. Every genocide, every ethnic cleansing, every program of social purification begins with this metaphysical dream: that if we could just eliminate the impure elements, we would finally arrive at the pristine essence of being. The violence is not in the execution but in the very ideal itself.

The delusion of uniformity

Fascism reveals a disturbing truth about collective desire: the fantasy of absolute purity seduces before it terrifies. It's not just a political ideology but a social pathology that promises to resolve the anguish of difference by eliminating the different. Like a nightmare that begins as a dream of perfect order and ends in a nightmare of extermination.

The fascist seduction operates precisely in this promise of radical simplicity: a world without conflicts because there are no others, a society without anxiety because there is no difference, an identity without fissures because all alterity has been eliminated. The delusion of uniformity becomes a political project, transforming the fantasy of completeness into a program of annihilation.

What's truly terrifying is not that fascism is a historical aberration but a latent temptation in every culture. Like a collective symptom that reveals the dark reverse of our desire for order and belonging. Politics thus becomes the stage where culture acts out its most primitive fantasies, where the dream of unity becomes a nightmare of elimination.

The paradox of the universal

There's a persistent fantasy in our time: that of a universality that erases differences, that standardizes experiences, that flattens singularities. But true universality operates in a radically different way: it doesn't eliminate differences but traverses them, finding what's common precisely in the recognition of what separates us.

Genuinely universal thought doesn't emerge from ignoring the fractures that divide us, but from confronting them in all their rawness. It's precisely when we recognize the depth of our differences that we can begin to build real bridges, not simulacra of understanding. The common doesn't pre-exist the encounter: it emerges as a consequence of traversing what distinguishes us.

The paradox is that we can only reach the universal through the particular, we only arrive at the common through the recognition of the singular. A universality that cannot contain differences is nothing but disguised totalitarianism. True common thought is not a starting point but a construction that emerges from facing our differences head-on.