Critical Theory, Fascism, and Antifascism: Reflections from a Damaged Polity (original) (raw)
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Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalism are a resurgent feature of the present historical conjuncture that will not be resolved by electoral politics or bipartisanship. Responding to the urgency of the current moment, this introduction to the "Fascisms" special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies explores what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist social movements and coalitions. We emphasize fascism as a geopolitically diverse series of entanglements with (neo)liberalism, racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, carceralism, white supremacy, racist nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and heteropatriarchy. By emphasizing fascisms in the plural, we seek to address two problematics in particular. First, our intention is to highlight the global proliferation of fascist formations within and beyond the United States and Europe in an expanded historical context. Second, we aim to center the historical, political, and epistemological work of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples across the planet.
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The aim of this article is to re-examine the relationship of fascism – up to and including its German National Socialist variant – to modernity, generally, and to capitalism, more specifically. Outlining a general conceptual framework within which these questions might be addressed, the article seeks to move beyond the habitual positing of abstract antinomies to a more dialectical approach to the questions posed. In the first part of the discussion, it is maintained that fascism and its extremism were quintessential phenomena of the modern age, while fiercely resistant to modernity. In the second, and concluding, part, it is argued that fascism was profoundly indebted to capitalism even as it was, in other ways, passionately opposed to it.
The Fascist Longings in Our Midst
Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 1995
Evil is never done so thoroughly and so well as when it is done with a good conscience. _,. ,. ° BIAISE PASCAL, Thoughts (279) Fascism is not the prohibition of saying things, it is the obligation to say them. ,. ROLAND BARTHES, Leçon (14) A. ASCISM" is A BANAL TERM. It is used most often not simply to refer to the historical events that took place in Hider's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, but also to condemn attitudes or behaviour that we consider to be excessively autocratic or domineering. 1 Speaking in the mid-1970s, Michel Foucault referred to the popularized use of the term "fascism" as "a general complicity in the refusal to decipher what fascism really was." The non-analysis of fascism, Foucault goes on, is "one of the important political facts of the past thirty years. It enables fascism to be used as a floating signifier, whose function is essentially that of denunciation" ("Power and Strategies" 139). In this essay, I attempt to study this-what amounts to a collective-"denunciation" of fascism by examining not only what is being denounced but also the major conceptual paths through which denunciation is produced. My argument is hence not exacdy one that avoids the "floatingness" of "fascism" by grounding it in a particular time or space. Instead, I take fascism as a commonplace, in the many ways it is used to indicate what is deemed questionable and unacceptable. In the process, I highlight what I think is fascism's most significant but often neglected aspect-what I will refer to as its technologized idealism. In my argument, fascism is not
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This seminal article analyses the current structural crisis and instability in an ever more polarised world in relation to earlier systemic crises that were resolved through fascism or through Fordist-Keynesian 'class compromise' (the 1930s) and the emergence of capitalist globalisation (the 1970s). The authors identify three basic responses to the crisis: popular insurgency from below; reformist stabilisation from above; and, a twenty-first century neo-fascism. Looking specifically at the US, they analyse political and economic developments that demonstrate fascistic characteristics. While no simple replication of the past, the emergence of a Christian Right since the mid-1980s, the growth of certain currents within the Tea Party movement, the sharp increase in violent hate groups, the spread of a vicious anti-immigrant movement, the psychopathology of white decline, sharp militarisation and pervasive policing give some indications of the rise of fascist tendencies. But what is crucial today is the sophistication of such a project, made possible by the ideological domination of media together with new surveillance and social control technologies that allow it to rely more on selective than generalised repression. In calling for a co-ordinated fightback, both in the US and beyond, the authors see the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism as a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards
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Fascism, 2012
The article suggests a way of mapping the remit for Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies by considering how far a "new consensus" has formed between specialists working in this area which conceptualizes fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism that attempts to realize the myth of the regenerated nation. It is a myth which applied in practice creates a totalitarian movement or regime engaged in combating cultural, ethnic and even biological ('dysgenic') decadence and engineering a new sort of 'man' in a alternative sociopolitical and cultural modernity to liberal capitalism. Having surveyed empirical evidence for the spontaneous emergence of a broad, though contested, scholarly convergence around this approach in the historical and social sciences in the last two decades, even beyond Anglophone academia, the article suggests that this development is part of an even wider phenomenon. This is the tendency for scholars to take seriously the utopian ideological and cultural dynamics of political phenomena once generally dismissed as exercises in the monopoly of power, of exercise of violence for its own 'nihilistic' sake rather than as a rebellion against nihilism in the search for a new order. It finishes with a reminder from several experts that fascism is not a static or immutable phenomenon, an insight that demands from scholars a willingness to track the way it adapts to the unfolding conditions of modernity, thereby assuming new guises practically unrecognizable from its inter-war manifestations.
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“The Returns of Fascism” addresses the emergence of New Right political culture on a global scale, attending to the intersections in US, European, Russian, and Indian New Right movements and their relation to the history of fascisms and late capitalist thought forms, as well as their attack on humanist critique. This special issue argues that the topoi of crisis and catastrophe serve the globalization of the New Right's supremacist and majoritarian political culture as it transcends both the academy and the wider world.
Fascism as an Ideological Form: A Critical Theory
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This paper argues that fascism is an ideological form rather than an ideological system. An ideology form can best be understood as a set of overall characteristics that distinguishes a class of ideologies from other classes of ideologies. This theory enhances our capacity for recognizing, problematizing, and critically analyzing both existing and potential variations of fascism. Fascist movements in different sociohistorical and geopolitical circumstances vary in terms of their belief systems, strategies, and politics, so conventional comparative methods and approaches that deduce their criteria from a particular model have restricted the area of fascism studies. I argue for a trans-spatial and trans-historical concept with flexible theoretical applications. My central claim is that fascism denotes a class of ideologies that have a similar form, just as a concept such as egalitarianism, socialism, sexism, or sectarianism makes sense as a form of ideology rather than a particular ideology or philosophy.
2019
Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are returning to haunt the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo considers Donald Trump as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Nietzsche, via Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Girard, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.