Abstract
In his introduction to this very stimulating, thoughtful collection, Samir Gandesha outlines a number of broadly shared themes guiding the investigation of the spectres of fascism today – the centrality of two dates, September 11, 2001, and the GFC of 2008, consideration of the continuities and discontinuities between today’s right and fascism, the importance of addressing psychoanalytical components of insecurity and fear in a time of crisis, and the tasks for a contemporary left facing the contemporary far-right. Up-front, Gandesha makes some illuminating remarks on the second issue, noting both striking discontinuities – say, the unlikelihood today of an organized, disciplined, mass-based fascist movement – and continuities, especially the parallel socio-economic crises, which unleash anxiety and insecurity, and which generate a ‘need for a connection to authentic Being, which is expressed in the form of homogeneous collective identities’ (p. 14).
Consideration of comparisons between historic fascism and today’s far-right happen particularly in the first, ‘History’, section of the book, beginning with Schmidt’s wide-ranging survey of Marxian theories of fascism, in which the author underscores both the difficulties Marxists had acknowledging mass support for historic fascism, and the lack of guidance given by their analyses of fascist constituencies. For Schmidt, the disparities between then and now in class terms are striking – the contemporary absence of powerful, threatening socialist or labour movements, the unlikelihood of an alliance between today’s far-right and the dominant classes.
In the last chapter of this section, Bar-On provides a comprehensive comparison between more recent French New Right and alt-right manifestos, viewing the two traditions as ideological cousins, equipped with a similar set of references (Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Evola, say) and a common disdain for liberalism, multiculturalism, capitalism, and egalitarianism, but distinguished by Spencer’s open racism and anti-Semitism, by the web-focused quality of the alt-right, and by the comparative lack of intellectual quality of the American cousin.
The remaining two chapters in this section are more focused on aesthetics. Mansoor explores the complex fascism-Futurism connection, the ‘complex imbrications of aesthetics and politics’ (p. 59), emphasizing the multiple political valences of Futurist artistic sensibilities, against Benjamin’s reading. Turning to today’s far-right, which involves ‘the unlikely alliance of Silicon Valley, libertarian accelerationism, corporate nihilism and reactionary white supremacism’ (p. 60), Mansoor claims that, once more, today, the right seems to be grasping ‘the mass effect of aesthetics which the left lost as a result of its fear of this faculty other to reason’ (p. 62). The left, then, needs a communist aesthetics, steadfastly occupying the terrain of desires and emotions, and uncowed by the uncertain valences of the aesthetic dimension. Balasescu’s chapter, meanwhile, focuses on how totalitarianism aesthetically projects its promises of salvation, making some imaginative connections between Ceausescu’s golden bathroom fittings and Trump’s taste for luxurious ornamentation, discourses of purity and treachery, and arguing that we must try to understand the affective link between totalitarian leaders and ‘the dreams of salvation of the disenfranchised’ (p. 76).
In both Mansoor’s and Balasescu’s contributions, we find some very provocative, associative culturalist and psychoanalytically-informed contentions and connections, and these qualities come to the fore in the ‘Theory’ section that follows. Beginning with Johal’s chapter on the work of Carl Schmitt, and the ways our times are becoming increasingly Schmittian (homogeneous peoples, friends and enemies, anti-pluralism, the state of exception as rule) – for instance in the ‘Unalienable Rights’ Commission launched by Mike Pompeo, which included right Schmittians from Telos – the section becomes largely psychoanalytic, and often very dense. Drawing on Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, an examination of the literature produced by Free Corps militants after the First World War, which contended that ‘fascism lies in the pre-Oedipal fear of dissolution back into the mother’, entailing ‘the armourization of the male self in the desperate quest to transcend mortality’ (p. 107), Marks seeks a more subtle, less bleak understanding of the fascism-misogyny connection. While we can see much of the same desire to dominate women and the ‘abject fear of the body’ (p. 114) in today’s far-right, the anthropological pessimism of Theweleit’s account needs to be countered by attention to other kinds of cultural impulses that ‘cultivate care, openness, vulnerability’ (p. 117), including other images of men who are ‘vulnerable, okay with being fucked’ (p. 118).
Returning to his introductory remarks about the distinctiveness of today’s far-right as illiberal democracy – rather than a mass movement bent on overthrowing democracy, establishing a one-party state, liquidating enemies – Gandesha draws on an Adorno essay to explore the massification of people. As Gandesha frames this, ‘The collective adulation and love of the leader is the way in which frustrated modern subjects overcome their negative self-images resulting from the failure to approximate their ego ideal…the leader represents the followers as their enlargement’ (pp. 124–5). Adorno’s portrait of Hitler as ‘a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber’, which holds too for the ‘great little men’ of our time, ‘reproduces the contradiction lying at the heart of bourgeois society between the theory of autonomy or freedom and the practice of heteronomy or unfreedom’ (p. 125). Neoliberalism has sharpened this contradiction, leading to a ‘proliferation of guilt, anxiety, frustration and ultimately anger’ (p. 129), people transformed into masses by today’s culture industry – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The following chapter by Fernandez-Alvarez also takes a psychoanalytic route, using the Lacanian left to critique the broader left response to the far-right today. For Fernandez-Alvarez, the current crisis of the master signifier produces a longing for a master, not only visible in figures such as Trump and Bolsonaro, but also in contemporary left culturalism, identity politics, and politically correct policing. Another path for left intellectuals, Fernandez-Alvarez argues, is possible: the analyst intellectual – ‘on the side of the feminine logic of the not-all, with clarity and desire, aware of their subjective division, to grasp opportunities to transform conditions (inscribe and re-inscribe) in the immediate cell of the institutions in which they dwell’ (p. 159).
The final section, ‘The Contemporary Horizon’, contains three more located chapters, and two which might have fitted better into Section One, ‘History.’ Of the latter, Hartle’s very compelling chapter uses situationist ideas to think about art and politics in the contemporary period. In a sense it continues the line of critique raised in the Fernandez-Alvarez chapter, emphasizing the limits of cultural leftism, the overestimation of artistic politics (politics as spectacle), and the recuperation of grassroots movements by liberal spectacular society, the integration of ‘leftist’ positions into the reality of modern capitalism, where leftism becomes another strategic, marketable identity. The answer, here, is to turn back to question the socioeconomic order. Braune’s chapter is a fascinating deep dive into the mobilizing passions of Steve Bannon, tracing the influence exerted on him by the ‘Traditionalist School’, which takes up occultist and neo-pagan positions, champions a spiritual elite, and is armed with a quite kooky cyclical view of history, in which our crisis period might be grasped and escalated by a new ‘hero generation’ who will restore proper hierarchies.
The other three chapters in this section, as noted, are more conjunctural. Safatle posits Latin America as a privileged far-right experimental space, first with Chilean neoliberalism – ‘a fascist horizon has always been the axis of the social organization of neoliberalism’ (p. 181) – more lately with Bolsonaro: ‘What is happening in Brazil today exemplifies…a logic that can be seen globally’ (p. 182). This chapter involves more elaboration on the importance of the two key dates set forth in the introduction, associating 9/11 with a paranoid notion of the nation-state and themes of borders, boundaries, invasion, and contagion, and the post-2008 austerity response with the far-right discourse of protectionism and the critique of global financial markets. The post-2008 uprisings and the massive social disidentification these entailed, though, have been used for ‘preventative counter-revolution’ (p. 187), with the pioneering Brazilian far-right formulating a ‘neoliberalism with an inhuman face’ (p. 189). Barkastcas’s chapter that follows also picks up on a theme raised in the introduction, but neglected until now – indigeneity, making the important connection between the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and something akin to the totalitarian rule of fascist regimes, pointing, at the same time, to the importance to historical fascism of a colonial imaginary. A championing of a ‘Red intersectionality’ to challenge colonial notions of justice is pitched as an important part of any left challenge to today’s far-right. Finally, in perhaps the most detailed and Gramscian of the chapters, Gudavarthy and Gudavarthy explore the manufacture of consent in the BJP’s ‘authoritarian regime with fascist tendencies’ (p. 223). The authors locate this consent in India’s agrarian crisis, the proliferation of informal, disorganized labour relations, chains of patronage, the neoliberal withdrawal of the state, the weakening of institutions, and caste and class changes and conflicts, opening divisions between the ‘Opens’ and the ‘somewheres’ and transforming the outsiders of neoliberal development ‘into insiders of a powerful cultural-national narrative’ (p. 225).
As noted in the acknowledgements section, this collection grew out of a year-long free school, that carried the book’s title, at Simon Fraser University. These origins mark the collection in both positive and occasionally frustrating ways. The themes and contentions set out in the introduction are partially and unevenly taken up – for instance, the emphasis on indigeneity and the central role of imperialism in fascism, the two key dates, the return of a social Darwinist imaginary, the far-right today as ‘a new fossil counter-revolution underwritten by the Koch Brothers’ (p. 12), the role of finance capitalism and debt. Nevertheless, all of the qualities of the very best symposiums are on display here – wide-ranging, free-wheeling, daring connections; a not-quite-finished dialogical atmosphere; urgent, daring political and strategic thinking in process. This imaginative, open, collaborative, strategic thinking is surely much needed as we wrestle with the unknown quantity that is the global, multifarious far-right.