James Martell & Tyler M. Williams
Volume 16, 2024
The essays collected in this special issue of Política Común do not pretend to encapsulate its topic completely. Rather, they serve as openings and invitations to consider for our era the relevance of deconstruction (broadly construed) to critiques of rising tides of fascism. Much work has already been done, for example, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy on the deconstruction of the “Nazi myth” (1990), and countless other studies have marshaled deconstruction toward a critique of various forms of fascism around the world, but engagement with the question of whether deconstruction itself entails a necessarily oppositional stance against fascism has, so far, left much to be desired. Therefore, without either announcing this topic for the first time or claiming to resolve it once and for all, this special issuegathers essays that investigate the possible stakes of a deconstruction of fascism today.
If opponents sought, for various reasons, to announce the death of deconstruction nearly as soon as it saw the light of day, at least two of the symbolic nails to be driven into deconstruction’s coffin entailed what some regarded as deconstruction’s tendency toward fascist apologia. The “Paul de Man Affair” and the “Heidegger Affair” in the late 1980s, to say nothing of the relative silence regarding Blanchot’s right-wing sympathies during the Vichy regime, signaled to deconstruction’s critics a kind of intellectual complicity, or at least comfort, with fascism—as if the kind of grammatological equivocation Derrida famously excavates from within the history of metaphysics also entails a moral equivocation on questions of political motivation. Today, amid right-wing hysteria over “critical theory,” “critical race theory,” and “postmodernism,” accusations by “anti-woke” charlatans that deconstruction (under the nonsensical strawman “postmodern neo-marxism”) is somehow responsible for the breakdown of all western culture, from lobsters to humans, have aligned deconstruction not with fascist sympathies but with a radical “post-truth” leftism in dire need of cleansing.
At the same time, if deconstruction’s critique of phallogocentrism has opened new ways of thinking about gender and sexual difference, which threaten the entrenched discourses of heteronormativity and sovereign masculinity, then deconstruction can be rightly blamed (or, commended) for opening a future beyond certain fascist repressions and violence. Needless to say, with the mainstream resurgence of strongman politics, chauvinistic dictatorships, nationalistic discourses, and virulent attacks against “feminism” and LGBTQ+ identities, which are taken as products of the “western,” “liberal,” or “woke” decadence to which their opposers dovetail deconstruction and theory, the precise stakes of deconstruction’s relation to fascism is as relevant and contentious today as ever.
The critique deconstruction mounts against philosophically totalized programs of origin, essence, identity, and other metaphysical structures of self-sameness has inspired some to align deconstruction squarely with anti-fascism and recent movements in post-anarchism. While deconstructive thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Chantal Mouffe, or Ernesto Laclau have no reservation identifying themselves within existing political paradigms, others are more reticent. As Catherine Malabou (2022) points out, philosophers like Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, et al, often use language of “anarchy” to describe the critical agility of their work, but none of them identify themselves as anarchists and in none of their work do they attend to the politico-philosophical history of anarchism itself. Likewise, whatever can be said of the fundamental antagonism this critical agility has against fascist mythologies of identity, blood, nation, heritage, and the like, none of deconstruction’s major thinkers engage directly and continuously with the historical or political praxes of antifascism or align their work with an overtly antifascist politics.
However, given their contexts and sometimes personal histories (Levinas, Cixous, Blanchot), these thinkers do characterize fascism as a complex political, if not sometimes even ontological, phenomenon portending not only dangers to certain democracies or societies but also to every individual. In some instances, these fascist dangers emerge in fascism’s classical, historical forms, like when Derrida, during his military service in Koléa in 1958, in the context of the Algerian War, wrote in an emphatic letter to Lucien Bianco: “Fascism will not pass” (Peeters 2013, 97). In other instances, they threaten as always possible resurgences of what Deleuze and Guattari call “micro-fascisms.”
The essays collected in this dossier address this complexity by reflecting on these different historico-social and personal dimensions in their constant entanglements. This project began as a seminar organized in 2021 for the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association. That seminar sought to articulate the relevance of deconstruction’s philosophical investment in a concept of “literature” toward a critique of fascist mythologization. This theme has carried over into several of the papers collected here. In “‘Auntie’-Fascism between Gertrude Stein and Jacques Derrida,” Ryan Tracy analyzes Gertrude Stein’s idiosyncratic anti- or “auntie-fascism” vis-à-vis recent purportedly “anti-fascist” critiques that miss a certain potentially fascist blind point in their analyses. Paula Cucurella’s text, “Como Banano de Rechazo,” takes as its starting point a simile in Gabriel García Márquez’ Cien años de soledad, which compares the jettisoning of human bodies with the act of discarding “rejected bananas.” Cucurella examines the aporias of the representation and non-representation of violence in literature, questioning the precise limits of violence in literary representations and their concomitant silences.
Bridging already the tenuous divide between literature, the social sciences, and antifascist struggles, Francesco Vitale’s essay, “‘In the blaze of the events.’ Reading George Bataille’s Missed Book—Le Fascisme en France,” examines Bataille’s plan for a book on fascism. Vitale shows how Bataille’s abandonment of the planned book might not necessarily spell a resignation to the book-weapon, but a switch into the strategy of narratives like Blue of Noon. Sarah Wood’s “Anagenda” plays on the etymological “bundle [fascio]” at the origin of the Italian term fascista to examine the possibilities of crisscrossing discourses (Moten’s, Derrida’s), literary and artistic practices (Worsdworth’s, Otis Redding’s), and, most importantly, practices of listening, as a creation of a non-fascistic “bundle” that can become us, the anasemic readers. This is a possibility for which, as she writes, “we have to go somewhere with people who can take us with them, who become able to take us by doing so even before we know we’re setting out.” Finally, in “Potabilities: Post-Violence Literature and its Limits,” Tyler M. Williams questions the possibility of a non- or post-violent literature, or if, following Barthes’ famous statement that language “is quite simply fascist,” literature is always complicit with a certain violence, and consequently, not a space for redemption or newfound peace.
Turning to contributions whose interrogations address dimensions beyond the literary, in “Echoes & Bones: Foiled Khôratic Reflections Against Fascism,” James Martell looks at the “rising ground” of stupidity and malevolence as described by Deleuze, and, with Derrida’s khôra in the background, examines a series of grounds, backgrounds, or bottoms [fonds], where our narcissistic reflections take place, from literature to the concrete violences of fascism. Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott’s text, “Deconstructing Fascist Mythologies,” tackles the main question of this special issue directly, looking at the contemporary understandings of fascism together with the complex histories of their “mythologies,” and concluding that “the task of a deconstruction of fascist mythologies is none other than the creation of a new conception of democracy.”
Our last two contributions, Luce deLire’s “An Unfortunate Case: Denazification and the Deconstruction of Value” and Rodrigo Gonsalves’ “Myths between Freud and Lacan: An Investigation of Bolsonaro’s Ideological Rise” look at two particular contemporary cases that exemplify not only the resurgence, but also the survival, of certain forms of 20th century fascism into the 21st century. deLire’s text shows, through the analysis of a concrete and personal case, the necessity to include a notion of indeterminacy in “post-Enlightenment” law, if something close to a post-fascist, denazified state can be approached. Lastly, Gonsalves’ contribution is a close analysis of the conditions of possibility that allowed the rise of a figure like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, seen through the light of Freud’s and Lacan’s insights into mythology and group formation.
In light of this broad constellation of approaches, and as stated above, this special issue does not aim in any way to totalize the subject of fascism or even of what a “deconstruction of fascism” could be. In the diversity of their questioning and critiques, these contributions show that, given the complicities of modern and neoliberal philosophies and politics with historical and resurgent forms of fascism, it is only–as Derrida saw–through a divisibility of the notion and actuality of sovereignty (and sovereign subjects) that we can think ways out of our deleterious, and sometimes even autoimmune, fascist drives. If literature is an essential part of these struggles, it is because its space, neither purely violent nor of utopian peace, is where the inscription and grouping of any trait, groove, or scratch takes place. In other words, it is where we can record and listen to our best and worst types of music, to Otis Redding or a military march. Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa / Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa / I keep singing them sad, sad songs, y’all.
Works Cited
- Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes. Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2, 1990, 291-312.
- Malabou, Catherine. Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2022.
- Peeters, Benoît. Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown. Malden, MA: Polity, 2013.