Volume 16

Deconstructing Fascist Mythologies

30 July 202430 July 2024By Rafael Fernandez

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott
University of Michigan

Volume 16, 2024

I believe, I truly believe, that true fascism is what sociologists have naively called “the consumer society”. A definition that seems harmless, purely indicative. But no. If one observes reality well, and above all if one knows how to read the objects, the landscape, the urban planning and, above all, the men, one sees that the results of this carefree consumer society are the results of a dictatorship, of a proper and real fascism.

Pier Paolo Pasolini. Scritti Corsari (243)1

I 

Before approaching the question of fascism, its mythological character and what is implied by its possible deconstruction, one should start by recognizing the complexity of the question itself, particularly when there is not a generally accepted definition of fascism.2 I am not only talking about the differences between German National Socialism and Italian fascism, or about the contemporary instantiations of fascism, but also about the assimilation of both, Nazism and fascism, with Stalinism under the category of totalitarian regimes. The same might be said with regard to the question of neo-fascism and its confusion with populism, whether we speak about the similarities between Mussolini’s regime and some Latin American cases of classical populism (particularly, Peronism)3, or about the so-called contemporary neo-populist movements. To produce some clarity in this labyrinthine situation is not the task of a particular discipline, but a task that involves different and complementary approaches to avoid the risk of repeating common places and gross generalizations. Among these generalizations are the insistence on the exceptional nature of Nazism and fascism; the subsumption of Nazism, fascism and Stalinism to totalitarianism as a homogeneous and exceptional historical experience; the rigid opposition between liberal democracy and totalitarian regimes, and the subsequent presentation of the actually existing liberal (or even neoliberal) democracy as the best possible political regime and the only real alternative to fascism.      

So let me start with an example that comes from a literary engagement with these issues. The ongoing publication of Antonio Scurati’s tetralogy dedicated to Mussolini’s life is not only a meritorious literary work, but a unique attempt to revisit the complex events that explain the emergence of Italian fascism. Scurati’s books are not traditional novels whose emphasis lies in the fictional nature of their plots, but rather literary essays intended to articulate a truthful narrative of these events, based on archives and other sources of information. The already published novels,4 in other words, tell a history whose impact should be measured in the present, because they give a coherent account of the series of events and processes that explain the configuration, from the early 1920s onwards, of Italian fascism, using Mussolini as the guiding thread of the story. In fact, each volume focuses on different aspects of this story: the relevance of the Great War and its painful aftermath; the postwar context and the rise of the radical left; the economic crisis of the 1930s; the role of the Catholic Church in the containment of communism; the subsequent radicalization of nationalist sentiments in the 1920s and 1930s; Mussolini’s leading role in organizing the postwar Italian state; the ongoing militarization of the masses that led to World War II, and so on. The fourth and still unpublished volume will complement this parable and will make possible, in the best of cases, a discussion about the singular political amnesia that followed the wars; an amnesia that led to the compromesso storico of the 1970s, which in turn ensured the preponderant role of the Christian-democratic sector and the exclusion of the radical left. Therefore, it is not only a coherent account of the past, but also an opportunity to question the mythological self-representation of a new Italy born out of war. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that this “amnesia” (an amnesia that has impeded a deep discussion and problematization of fascism) was precisely what Pasolini identified as the condition of possibility for a new type of fascism in the post-war period; a neofascism even more efficient than its previous instantiation.5 

Thus, what seems relevant with Scurati’s work is that it opens the necessary reconsideration of the series of factors that led to fascism without falling into the exceptionalist thesis that reduces the complexity of these processes to the aberrant personality of Mussolini.6 This is, indeed, a work in progress not only because the fourth and last book of the tetralogy has not been published, let alone the still pending translation of the other volumes, but because such a discussion involves the revision of a series of common places that inform the official version of the Italian and the European history.7 

However, I am referring to this literary example because it shows that, contrary to what is usually believed, literature is not necessarily a practice of mythification (a fictional elaboration opposed to historical truth)8, but a practice that allows one to understand (in an unconventional figurative way) the complexity of historical processes and to resist its Manichean reduction. It is this tension between historical complexity and mythification that should be at the center of any possible deconstruction of fascist mythologies, insofar as dealing with such mythologies cannot be confused with a process of demythologization, which relies heavily on the opposition between historical truth and myth. Elaborating a sustained interrogation of fascism demands a different relationship with history and with the question of truth, that is, a different conception of historical truth, which cannot simply be opposed to falsehood, fiction, myth, or ideology; otherwise, we will remain ensnared in the very problematic opposition between fascism and democracy.

In fact, if the “task” we assign to ourselves is to deconstruct fascist mythologies, then we should avoid introducing, through a surreptitious mechanism, the metaphysical opposition between myth and truth; for this opposition seems to take for granted a politics of truth that, far from any relapse into the mythical or the mythological, could command historical progress, forgetting that “historical progress” is also already a powerful “myth” of modernity. For this -and, in addition to the systematic interrogation of the Nazi Myth and the whole question related to national aestheticism and the onto-mimetology that feed the mythological self-representation of German ideology, elaborated by Jean-Luc Nancy and specifically by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1990, 2007)—, the work of the Italian thinker Furio Jesi is indispensable. Consequently, Jesi complicates the question of myth by distinguishing it from mythology, which represents the secondary knowledge about myths. But Jesi also presents the very technification of myths, operated by the Nazi apparatus, as an instrumentalization of mythological materials, now converted into political propaganda and destined to reproduce the call for total mobilization (Secret Germany, Time and Festivity, 2021). However, in his analysis, Jesi does not assimilate the technification of myth, propaganda and Nazism because he also considers social revolts as “political” processes that allow a different relationship with temporality and, at the same time, a different relationship with mythological materials and propaganda (Spartakus, 2014). In other words, the revolt, as a modern form of festivity, implies an epiphanic relationship with myths that cannot be homologated with the Nazi technification. On the contrary, the revolts appear in his work as an interruption of the mythological machine that informs our political institutions and practices. 

For Jesi, in other words, revolts are suspensions of our experience of time, different from revolutions, which are events that confirm and fulfill the very (auto-telic) logic of our modern conception of temporality. Thanks to this conception of the revolt, we can now differentiate, on one hand, the fascist technification of mythological materials and, on the other hand, the epiphanic experience of myth that characterizes the revolt, as a suspension of the spatialized temporality of capital. Indeed, the criterion for differentiating the Nazi mythological machine and its propaganda from, for example, the Spartacists call to action in Germany, in 1918, is not given only or mostly by differences in programs or ideological objectives, but by their different relationships with temporality. The Nazis wanted to fulfill, through the war, the program of the German nation, while the Spartacist wanted to suspend the war and the political and economic conditions that produced it, in the first place, as a capitalist /imperialist war. Therefore, the revolt, as a profane experience of disobedience, opens the possibility for a different relationship to others, to the city and to the organization of everyday life, beyond guilt and sacrifice.9 In short, in their different relationship to temporality lies the possibility to distinguish revolts from the fascist call to total mobilization.

On the other hand, the relationship between politics and myths, and the instrumentalization of mythological materials, define a terrain of political dispute that evokes both Derrida’s reading of Plato and the question of Khõra (1996), and his solicitation of the “white mythology”, which not only refer to the uses of the metaphors in the philosophical texts (Derrida, 1982), but also to a more brutal “White” mythology that informs the totality of western political thought (colonialism, imperialism, racism, speciesism, etc.). Deconstructing white/White mythologies is not a demythologization process and it cannot be confused with a politics that claims a total overcoming of the mythical/metaphorical contamination. Hence, deconstruction is not demythologization because demythologization, unmasking, secularization, as words and as operations, presuppose both a strong relationship with history and truth, with historical truth (they are in fact functions of the modern philosophy of history) and, a clear-cut demarcation between myth and scientific knowledge, between lie and truth, between science and faith, forgetting that this same demarcation is always tentative, uncertain, fragile, historical in itself. On the contrary, the interrogation of fascist mythologies cannot rest on the postulation of pure concepts, transcendental meanings, safe positions, nor can it proclaim a refutation or an expulsion of anyone from the kingdom of truth and reason. Far from that, the actual deconstruction of fascist mythologies and their persistent repetition is an always-ongoing interrogation that understands the logic of contamination, of the supplement, and the topology of political positions as always historically contingent. There is no safe place, no institutional order capable of preventing or being absolutely immune to fascism, and this im-possibility is the possibility of democracy, but of an autoimmune democracy that cannot be seduced by the logic of force, of clear significance, of the incorruptible institutional order, a democracy that takes itself as the final and absolute overcoming of fascism, since fascism, like nihilism, feeds on this demarcating foundation and on this substantive logic (Rogues, 2005).  Therefore, the “task” of deconstructing fascist mythologies must be approached according to the specific conditions of each case, to avoid falling into the prescriptive and normative logic of general discourses against fascism; the general discourses that end up failing to notice the extent to which fascism continues to be a condition of possibility that haunts democracy itself. The deconstruction of fascism, then, is not less than the deconstruction of politics itself, its fundaments, institutions, and practices.

With these elements in mind, let us now elaborate some observations regarding the so-called contemporary neo-fascism.

II

In recent years, the question of fascism, its nature and historical manifestations, has become increasingly relevant thanks not only to the advancement of historical research but also due to the irruption of several massive movements identified with such a political doctrine or “ideology”.10 From the claims of The National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen and The National Rally of Marine Le Pen, father and daughter, in France, to the Golden Dawn in Greece; from the Partido Popular and VOX in Spain, to the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany; and from Donald Trump’s reconfiguration of the Republican Party in the United States to Jair Bolsonaro’s recent administration in Brazil, we can see, at least nominally, the emergence of several fascist-like movements that claim both to be legitimate (even more democratic than democracy) and, at the same time, to be the enactment of an anti-establishment and “re-foundational” revolution. To this provisional list, one could also add the singular experience of Iran’s fundamentalist regime (as a consequence of the dire American intervention in the Middle East), and the constant growth of a fascist-like right-wing movement in India (Hindutva). Despite many differences, what these and many other contemporary extreme right-wing irruptions seem to share is a strong reaction to globalization and a paranoid (and nativist) defense of the so-called national identity, understood in cultural, religious, territorial, linguistic, and ethnic terms. This paranoid reaction is a defense of the “proper” (identity/race) from the perceived attack unleashed by the fluxes of capital and the increasing waves of immigrants. One can already see this kind of “rationale” in the ongoing discussion regarding laïcité and the veil debate in France; the inhospitable reaction to Syrian immigrants in Europe; the apathy regarding sub-Saharan immigrants in the European side of the Mediterranean; and the intensification of control and policing practices at the Mexico-US border, including the brutal incarceration of children during the last administration.11 In this last context, Samuel Huntington’s book, Who are we? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2005), despite its lack of intellectual merit, could be read as a symptomatic narrative about the official position of the American administration regarding the question of immigration and national security. Of course, the fact that immigration and security are framed together is not a simple coincidence, as Hannah Arendt already voiced in the 1950s.12

We must not forget that Huntington’s book preaches a Manichean hypothesis in which American identity is opposed to and affected by the cultural contamination caused by Latino immigrants, repeating with this argument the structural narrative of his previous pamphlet, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996), where the central conflict was articulated by the opposition between the West and the East. In fact, in that earlier book, Huntington represented the geopolitical reconfiguration of the post-Cold War period as already marked by a bipolar conflict between the free world and Eastern fundamentalism, reproducing a generalizing and reductionist logic fueled by the opposition between friend and enemy.13 Something similar happens in his 2005 book, in which he portrays the Latino immigration to the United States as a contamination of the pure American mind, the WASP nation shaped by the principles of Manifest Destiny and the doctrine of American Exceptionalism. For him, in this new scenario, the true or “pure” American should confront the influences of a pre-modern, defiant, collective, and Catholic form of life associated with those uprooted southern populations that threaten the American project of universal order, which is the result of the doubtful combination of capitalism and democracy. In other words, the threat of Communism, now apparently exhausted after the fall of the whole socialist block, has become the threat of ethnic and cultural diversity, a diversity that seems to corrode the foundations of the American way of life. 

The current revival of fascism, however, is not new, it rather reveals an ongoing transformation within fascism to adapt itself to the changing dynamics of contemporary, post-industrial, and post-Fordist societies. No wonder then that already in the mid-1970s, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his “refutation” of the trilogy of life, considered the Italian culture of the post-war period already articulated by a new kind of power that, thanks to a competitive and individualist education and to the predominance of television as a neutralization (anesthetization) of the senses, produced an “anthropological mutation” that seemed irreversible.14 It was this “anthropological mutation”, which resonates with the homo economicus of the neoliberal doctrine, that forced Pasolini to review his earlier cinema, still invested in the potentialities of youth and sensuality, in order to produce what was the incomplete project of his “trilogy of death”, from which we might consider his 1975 film Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, and his last and unfinished novel, Pretolio. Suddenly, a few months before his tragic death, Pasolini, who had apparently lost all hope, anticipated a more flexible configuration of a kind of fascism invested in the domestication of life according to a simplified image of the human, which fulfilled, not without irony, the programming project of the fascist’s first and more brutal war-machine in the early 20th century. Now, notwithstanding, the monumental fascism of the early twenty century is replaced by a more flexible mutation, which by the same period led Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to speak about micro-fascism. This new form of fascism was characterized not by the principle of command distinctive of its first instantiation, but by a series of practices no longer concerned with disciplining and repressing social conducts, but rather oriented to control them in a more intense and intimate way.15

In this new context, and following somehow the mass psychology of fascism elaborated by Wilhelm Reich, Deleuze and Guattari were able to understand fascism as a form of control that does not operate only at the molar or macro-political space, by a hierarchical logic and having the State and its reproduction as its final goal. On the contrary, micro or neo-fascism was presented as an actual possibility triggered by the decentering effects of post-Fordist (or axiomatic) capitalism, which complicated the monumental yet organized image of modern societies, making it impossible to identify fascism with a particular political ideology. Certainly, this is the reason why the characterization of fascism as an ideology must be questioned. Not only because the very notion of ideology seems to operate at the molar or macrophysical level of social representations, but also because, in its classical sense, ideology seems to be a coherent, albeit “false” or inverted image of the world, whereas the internal transformation of fascism implies a kind of flexibility that articulates itself with any social practice and with any representation of the world. This basically means that the ontological fiction of classical fascism has given birth to an infinity of fictional ontologies in the present. Somehow, the best trick of fascism is its ability to pervade the very logic of subjectivation in our societies, which not only complicates the homogeneous and “exceptional” notion of fascism, but questions the pertinence of identifying fascism with a clear-cut political position. 

Consequently, in 1971 when Hannah Arendt published her almost testamentary piece, “Lying in politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers”, she was not only referring to the crisis of American liberal democracy, the corruption of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the systematic lies to the public, and the criminal sacrifice of American lives (not to mention the brutality of the American war-machine implemented in Vietnam). She was also dealing with a mutation in contemporary politics that, as Pasolini warned around the same time, was now totally subsumed under the logic of competition, the fight for hegemony, the plain expression of will-to-power, and the uncensored use of mass media and propaganda coming from the mad men of Madison Avenue. Arendt’s interesting piece, which a year later appeared as part of her book Crisis of the Republic,16 should also be considered as a revision of her theory of totalitarianism, which was first elaborated in her 1951 monumental study Origins of Totalitarianism and supplemented later by her 1963 book, On revolution. In this latter book, Arendt not only extended the notion of totalitarianism to that of revolutionary terror and incorporated Robespierre as one of its most significant personifications, but she also opposed the French Revolution, understood as a totalitarian revolution, to the American Revolution, considered as the founding moment of an alternative republican tradition. However, after the Vietnam War and the disclosing of the US State’s systematic strategy to perpetuate its aggressive foreign policy, the whole frame she helped to reinforce, the hermeneutical frame of the Cold War and the irreconcilable opposition between Communism and Capitalism—translated as the opposition between totalitarianism and democracy—, could no longer be sustained. The conclusion is brutal, either Communism (identified with Stalinism) was not a totalitarian “exception” radically opposed to the free world, as too many intellectuals were so prone to denounce by the mid-twentieth-century17 or, alternatively, the so-called free world, mutated from within, was becoming uncannily similar to totalitarianism.18 

In recent times, and among the increasing number of studies dedicated to the new faces of fascism, it is worth mentioning the volume by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, The Fascism of Ambiguity (2022), in which she proposes an analysis that emphasizes the difference between historical fascism and its current manifestations. For her, breaking from Mussolini’s self-conscious definition of Italian fascism19 is the condition of possibility to capture the series of mutations and intensifications that characterize contemporary fascism as a possibility that inhabits deeply in our democratic horizon. Jean-Luc Nancy states in the Foreword to this volume that fascism “[t]oday is an ideo-mytho-logy of the polymorphous, individual, and indefinitely repeatable satisfaction that fascizes the rich by their commerce and their consumption, the poor by their lack and their hate. Cocaine and smartphones—these are good examples of this fascism whose reality could be named addiction. For addiction is the escape from the real and the symbolic: it is an existence where ambiguity consists in in-existing” (viii). 

The fascism of ambiguity, therefore, proliferates as a prosthesis of meaning in the context of an increasing abstraction of the real, whether we speak about the complication of capitalist accumulation processes or, alternatively, about the abstraction of power institutions and social relations. As a prosthesis of meaning, fascism is a call to simplicity, a call to mobilization that does not require the recovery of a fictional monumental past, but the unthoughtful identification with any conspiracy theory circulating in the non-traditional media. In fact, one of the most telling ideas advanced by Cavalcante Schuback is that with this ambiguity, fascism feeds from the fiction of political participation, very much related to the infinite propagation of online surveys, pools, reality shows, interactive programs, etc., which in turn depletes the sense of any actual political participation by neutralizing it.20 If Walter Benjamin considered mobilization and war as constitutive elements of historical fascism; today, this permanent or total mobilization, as Ernst Jünger called it, remains a distinctive element of neo-fascism. The difference however lies in the fact that mobilization is no longer organized around the fiction of a glorious past nor motivated by the so-called Kriegsideologie of the early 20th century, but around a system of permanent somatic stimuli unleashed by the hyperconnectivity of the tele-tecno-mediatic order. The proliferation of fascism is indeed the proliferation of virtual and flexible onto-mythologies that are possible by the ambiguity of social meaning and the resulting effect of saturation, which, in turn, promises individual success but produces undifferentiation:

What Pasolini had seen— insists Cavalcante Schuback— as the event of “something” happening and which he witnessed with the disappearance of the fireflies from the Italian landscape, becomes more and more explicit as the universal event of every thing, sense, and value transforming into any thing, into any sense and any value, emptying both the senses and values of things as well as the sense and value of the sense and value. This is what we might call “anyzation” of each thing. With that, the sense of each and every one, the sense of the singular, dissipates, since each one is now confused with anybody.”

(The Fascism of Ambiguity, 42).21

This plea for the singular could be related to the interrogation of the principle of equivalence elaborated by Jean-Luc Nancy (The Truth of Democracy, 2010). According to Nancy, the principle of equivalence is a metaphysical and onto-political principle that predominates in our globalized society, a principle that reduces the problem of différance and singularity (and the crucial question of democracy) to the equivalential operations of value and law. In other words, it is the universalization of this principle of equivalence, as an obliteration of the singular-plural, thanks to the neoliberal implosion of monadic and fictive ontologies, that characterizes the internal mutation of democracy to its current, managerial and techno-planetarian articulation, and it is this mutation that Cavalcante Schuback considers as the defining horizon of the fascism of ambiguity. However, what makes this principle of equivalence a distinctive trait of contemporary techno-planetarian and consumerist capitalism is the technological reduction of experience that provokes a new kind of poverty, as Benjamin would have put it. This “poverty of experience” is none other than the standardization of social memories and narratives, which Bernard Stiegler considers as part of the new process of proletarianization based on the expropriation of secondary and tertiary retentions and the cancellation of any possible future (For a New Critique of Political Economy, 2010). So, it would not be misleading to think together the fascism of ambiguity, the question of addiction (and the whole pharmacological dimension), the saturation of the polis (hypsipolis) and the subsequent emptying of the political (apolis), as a general trend that defines contemporary societies of symbolic misery.22  How then to approach the task of deconstructing fascist mythologies?  

III

In this regard, the problematization of neo-fascism should not obscure the differences between fascism and Nazism (its anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism, corporatism, and its nationalism), nor the current and problematic circulation of fascism as a label attached to any non-institutional political movement. Calling any movement that opposes neoliberal democracy and questions the role of political parties and State institutions fascist, is only a strategy aimed at delegitimizing these movements. This is, by the way, the usual response of the State to social protests around the world in recent years, from the beginnings of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter and the Chilean revolts of 2019, let alone the early 1990s Zapatista movement that complicated the managerial character of the Mexican neoliberal democracy, not to mention the official characterization of recent student protests against the war in Gaza, as antisemitic and antidemocratic manifestations. How then can we differentiate neo-fascists irruptions disguised with revolutionary rhetoric and actual movements of protests oriented to deepening democracy and limiting market imperatives? Benjamin’s characterization of the fascist call for mobilization to maintain the status quo remains relevant today for understanding the call of current fascism for a mobilization that not only maintains neoliberalism as its status quo, but intensifies it. 

The increasing proletarianization of modern man —insists Benjamin— and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses -but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged.

(The work of art, 269)

Therefore, beyond its “revolutionary” rhetoric, neo-fascists’ call to action are irruptions that favor the intensification of accumulation processes and the devastating effects of techno-planetarian capitalism. Neo-fascist calls for total mobilization share with the imperatives of capital the same productivist understanding of man,23 and the same archeo-teleological representation of time. In other words, to distinguish social revolts from other irruptions such as the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a massive group of Trump followers, or the recent events unleashed in Brazil by the followers of Jair Bolsonaro, requires a rigorous consideration of the foundations of our political tradition and the interrogation of the structural co-belonging of violence and law (as mythical violence). I would venture to say that the difficulty of making this “difference” (between total mobilization and social uprisings) is one of the most complex problems of our political moment since it requires questioning both the mythological representation of modern revolutions and the mythological core of the law, the same core that conditions the totality of our political and juridical institutions and limits our understanding of democracy.24 Thus, here and in an absolutely preliminary way, I will propose that social uprisings are life-affirming movements beyond neoliberalism, while the logic of total mobilization that motivates recent anti-establishment events in the US, Brazil, Argentina or France are oriented towards the intensification of neoliberalism and its political anthropology. This criterion is certainly insufficient and requires further elaboration, although it is not my objective here, I would suggest that the deconstruction of fascist mythologies also implies the questioning of the logic of life that is at the center of these mythologies (Derrida, Life Death 2020). Because problematizing our habitual conceptions of life is questioning logocentrism and the determination of the living being according to the archeo-teleological determination of temporality, in such a way that the relationship between life and politics can no longer be governed by conventional onto-political markers (subject, reason, intentionality, sovereignty, etc.).

As an alternative differentiation between social revolts and neofascists irruptions, Chantal Mouffe proposes a left-oriented populism to understand Podemos in Spain and the recent Pink Tide in Latin America (For a Left Populism, 2019), since these movements are radically different from their neofascist counterpart. However, she does not offer a comprehensive critique of the way in which both Podemos and the Pink Tide were eventually sucked into the pervasive logic of neoliberalism and its constitutive flexibility regarding the relationship between the economic imperatives of accumulation and the state. On the other hand, in The New Faces of Fascism. Populism and the Far Right (2019) Enzo Traverso advances the notion of post-fascism to deal with the historical specificities of contemporary fascist-like political movements, without obliterating the singularities of early twentieth-century European fascism. Thanks to this conceptual “innovation”, Traverso aims to understand the concrete historicity of contemporary “post”-fascist movements, by a paradoxical double operation that consists in keeping the allusion to fascism and then canceling it by placing the prefix “post” at the beginning of the word. As usual, his suggestive analyses are worth reading, even if one cannot but disagree with such a linguistic innovation. An innovation, one should remark, that does not say anything regarding his unspecific use of the notion of populism, which Mouffe (and Laclau)25 have attempted to rehabilitate as a central political concept. No matters, Even Traverso, who is one of the most rigorous scholars of modern European history,26 understands both the abuse of the notion of fascism today and the uncanny similarities between historical fascism and contemporary extreme right-wing movements. The same might be said about Theodor Adorno who, in his 1967 lecture in Austria entitled Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (2019), addressed the tactical innovations of the new German right-wing to cope with the shame of Auschwitz, while reasserting the main elements defining the authentic German nation and its undefeatable future.

Thus, despite the need to continue investigating the specific aspects of each of these cases and to specify a minimum meaning of fascism, Nazism and contemporary neo-fascism, we can draw some minimal conclusions that allow us to readdress the question of fascist mythologies, and what its deconstruction could imply. Certainly, these mythologies must be understood as a constitutive (and not exceptional) element of the Western onto-political tradition. There is, actually, a complicated history of fascism, of the historical phenomenon and of the (uses of the) word, which requires one to be able to question, beyond disciplinary claims and rigid categorizations, its metamorphoses during the 20th and 21st centuries. Thus, fascism cannot be taken as an already defined ideal type, a political formation, a particular kind of leadership, or a punctual departure from liberal democracies, without falling into the logic of exceptionalism that limits many intellectual and political discourses in the present. Fascism as a socio-political possibility, in other words, has been present since the beginning of industrial capitalism, and, regardless of its different mutations, it is not alien to the techno-planetary organization of current economies and societies.

On the other hand, the metamorphoses of fascism must be understood together with the variations of sovereignty and the modifications of the accumulation processes that define modern and contemporary capitalism. For, without resorting to a determinist (economist) argument, one must understand the meaning of fascism as dependent on historically concrete constellations of accumulation processes, transformations of the forces and relations of production, sovereignty, and political strategies to organize/reform the social. This was the intuition of Antonio Gramsci, who in several articles between 1920 and 1925 (and later in several notes disseminated in his Prison Notebooks), problematized the rising of Mussolini and the birth of fascism in Italy. For Gramsci, fascism was a form of passive revolution oriented to contain the Communist revolution and to reinvigorate capitalist development in the context of the 1920 crisis. Far from a conservative (ultramontane) force, for the Sardinian, fascism was a program oriented to reorganize the whole society in the context of the progressive internalization of industrial capitalism; a program that needs to be analyzed in conjunction with the authoritarian modernization of Nazi Germany and Fordism as a way of life (Americanism).27 

However, in post-industrial and post-Fordist times, and despite the need for more clarification regarding these and other concepts, what is obvious is the pervasive experience of a techno-planetary capitalism, which produces symbolic misery, a saturation of political spaces and depoliticization, through the hyperconnectivity and intensification of possessive individualism due to an ongoing onto-anthropological mutation. To deal with these issues, one needs a more elaborated understanding of fascism, informed not only by the ethnography of its historical instantiations but also by the solicitation of its onto-political dimensions. In this sense, the problematization of fascism is also an interrogation of the archeo-teleological structuration of temporality, and its complementary logocentric obliteration of différance. We are talking about a kind of fascism that disguises itself within the mythological machine of modern States, and because of that, we are confronting a fascist mythology that permeates our conventional representation of democracy. However, once this line of reflection is opened, one cannot fail to notice how the real possibility of deconstructing fascist mythologies implies the questioning of the logocentric tradition and its various metamorphoses, a deconstruction of the intertwining of politics, metaphysics, technology and subjectivism that not only affects democracy, but also what we identify as political thought or political philosophy. Precisely because the task of deconstructing fascist mythologies also implies, and perhaps urgently, the need to interrogate the limitations of our onto-political tradition in toto.

But, at the same time, if the separation between fascism and neoliberal democracy is no longer clear, then, the task of a deconstruction of fascist mythologies is none other than the creation of a new conception of democracy. It is in this context that the work of deconstruction in general, and the work of Derrida in particular, seem to be relevant. Certainly, Derrida’s confrontation with Heidegger, since the 1960s onwards, is a crucial element in Derrida’s own interrogation of the logocentric tradition, which will be later supplemented by his reflections on the death penalty, the question of sovereignty, the logic of life, and the status of the poem in Heidegger’s Geschlecht and beyond. At the same time, all this critical work is deeply related to a revitalization of democracy but beyond its modern, European, tradition, which is presented under the formula “la démocratie à venir”. The temporal structure of this à venir, of this democracy to come, differs from any calculation that belongs to the modern philosophy of history, and opens the question about the intrinsic relationship between deconstruction and democracy beyond any conventional understanding of politics. 

Therefore, the deconstruction of fascist mythologies enables a thinking of the temporal structure of the promise, beyond the ipseity of sovereignty, open to the relationship between historicity and différance, and in opposition to the principle of cruelty that informs our neo-fascist and still theologico-political global order, opening a place for democracy that cannot be reduced to the calculative cartography informing contemporary geopolitics and geo-philosophy. This democracy to come, of course, is not safe from fascism, it is not impermeable to mythological technification, and cannot be presented as a telos that will expiate our current sacrifices. This democracy to come does not have any force or power to oppose or exclude any anti-democratic practice, and, as such, it remains tied to the temporal logic of the promise, that far from the logic of progress and the destinal temporality of the exception, is better understood as a quasi-transcendental iteration of itself. The promise alludes and iterates the promise, keeping our present in disagreement with itself, as already contaminated with the possibility of a better world. Without foundational force, the promise promises another than a political way of living, an infrapolitical possibility beyond saturation, where “it is not certain that ‘democracy’ is a political concept through and through’” (Rogues 39).

Notes

  1. “Io credo, lo credo profondamente, che il vero fascismo sia quello che i sociologhi hanno troppo bonariamente chiamato «la società dei consumi». Una definizione che sembra innocua, puramente indicativa. Ed invece no. Se uno osserva bene la realtà, e soprattutto se uno sa leggere intorno negli oggetti, nel paesaggio, nell’urbanistica e, soprattutto, negli uomini, vede che i risultati di questa spensierata società dei consumi sono i risultati di una dittatura, di un vero e proprio fascismo.”  ↩︎
  2. I want to thank Tyler Williams and James Martell for organizing the seminar Deconstruction contra Fascist Mythologies at ACLA (April 08-11, 2021) where this text, in a preliminary form, was first read.  ↩︎
  3. See the early study of Ernesto Laclau, Política e ideología en la teoría marxista: Capitalismo, fascismo, populismo, 1978. ↩︎
  4. Those are: M. Il figlio del secolo (2018); M. L’uomo della provvidenza (2019); and, M. Gli ultimi giorni dell’Europa (2022). In English HarperCollins published in 2022 M: Son of the Century: A Novel. One should not dismiss how the English editor feels the need to incorporate in the title the word “novel”.  ↩︎
  5. See the already referred Scritti corsari (1975). ↩︎
  6. In fact, one can complement Scurati’s narrative with his own previews essay dedicated to the intrinsic relationship between vision and war in the western tradition. See, Guerra. Narrazione e culture nella tradizione occidentale (2007); and with his recently published monograph entitled Fascismo e populismo: Mussolini oggi (2023). ↩︎
  7. This makes also possible to reconsider the less visited relationship between Italian fascism and its continuation in some Latin American cases. See, for example, the issue 138 of the Radical History Review, titled: Fascism and Antifascism since 1945, that includes articles dealing with Argentina and Brazil. ↩︎
  8. Although there are several examples of literary (and artistic) works that have been appropriated for a mystifying and fascist reading. See Furio Jesi, Secret Germany (2021), for example.  ↩︎
  9. Since guilt and sacrifice define, according to Benjamin (1921), capitalism as an unprecedented form of religion, based not on the expiation of guilt, but on its intensification (“Capitalism as religion” 2004). Guilt and Sacrifice, in other words, determine the whole structure of our modern liberal political institutions and practices. 
    ↩︎
  10. I put “ideology” between quotation marks as this is an attribution one should not take for granted. ↩︎
  11. These paranoid reactions are constitutive of the transformation of political institutions and practices produced by globalization, among them, the metamorphoses of sovereignty as such. See Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2017). However, one should not mistake this process with the logic of a geopolitical reconfiguration that divide the world in a Global North and a Global South; a division that is also part of the same kind of generalizations tied to the recalcitrant perseverance of identity politics and sovereignty. As a telling case, see the southern border of Mexico as a brutal example of a walled State that decenter the geopolitics of the Global South. ↩︎
  12. See her Origins of Totalitarianism, 1973, particularly chapter nine: “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”. ↩︎
  13. An opposition that defines, as is well known, The concept of the political in Carl Schmitt (2007), and one that has been questioned by Derrida (Politics of Friendship, 2006), among others.  ↩︎
  14. See the already mentioned Escritti corsari. For an English version of his “Repudiation of the Trilogy of Life”, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 2005. Pp. XVII-XX. ↩︎
  15. In this sense, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: The Anti-Oedipus (1983, originally published in 1972), and A Thousand Plateaus (1987, originally published in 1980), are still the most systematic elaborations of the series of transformations leading to new forms of fascism today.   ↩︎
  16. Arendt’s piece appeared in The New York Review, on November 18th, 1971. Then in Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, 1972. ↩︎
  17. Arendt was familiar with Alexandre Koyré’s article The Political Function of Modern Lie (1945), which first problematized the ambiguous relationship between power, truth, and the question of lying as a political practice in totalitarian regimes. Koyré, like Levinas, considers this ambiguous determination of truth and lie, in totalitarian contexts, as a defining characteristic of power, precisely because more fearsome than the use of the lie in politics was the State proclamation of an official truth. ↩︎
  18. One should consider here the early characterization of fascism and its post-war mutations by Herbert Marcuse, who did not vacillate in disclosing the structural similarities between Stalinism and Western liberal democracies, as regimes oriented to continuing and intensifying the logic of capitalist accumulation and total domination of life. See his collected papers of the early 1940, published in 1998 under the title Technology, War and Fascism.  ↩︎
  19. See Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (1968). ↩︎
  20. When reading a verse from Sophocles’ Antigone, she states: “hypsipolis, apolis, the excess of polis, of politics, the emptying of the polis, of politics. The excess of sense, the emptying of sense: this is the rhythm of an operation of sense, which empties sense by its exacerbation, by its hyperbole” (37). This interrogation of the hyperbole of the political is consistent with the infrapolitical insistence on the irreducibility of life to politics, a reduction that characterizes the onto-political demand for politicization. See, Moreiras, “The Absolute Difference between Life and Politics’”. (2021).    ↩︎
  21. She mentions in passing that along with this “anyzation”, she has also used, as a verb, the construction “to whatsoever” or “whatsoevering”, to emphasize this process of undifferentiation. However, one should note that this whatsoevering or anyzation triggered by the tecno-planetarian saturation of capitalism is the opposite of the “whatever” (qualunque or quelconque) with which Agamben wants to think the singular in a new radical way (beyond the dialectic between the universal and the particular).  ↩︎
  22. One should mention here, as a missing link and as an important reference regarding the so-called second industrial (technological) revolution, the impact of television and the anthropological mutation unleashed by the new technologies and their hyper-connectivity, without forgetting the overlapping of technological inventions and the military imperatives, including the question of the atomic bomb and the reasons that justified its use, see the work of Günther Anders.  ↩︎
  23. This understanding of man, which begins by the classical metaphysical determination of human beings as zoon echon logon, is only intensified by modern humanism and its determination of man in the horizon of the subject, conscience and intentionality. The possessive individualism of classical liberalism as well as the homo economicus of contemporary neoliberalism, born out the anthropological mutation warned by Pasolini, are other names that points to the question on humanism, subjectivity and the status of labor and production in the process of humanization (appropriation) of the world. See Heidegger’s problematization of Hegel and Marx in Letter on Humanism (2018). Not to mention how the question about the animal opens a new way to problematize this onto-anthropological determination.  ↩︎
  24. Indeed, this is the context in which the critique of law as mythical violence (Benjamin), the legitimation crisis in late capitalism (Habermas), and the reformulation of the question of law and the auto-immune condition of democracy, including the questioning of anti-parliamentarism of the German-Jewish intelligentsia by Derrida, are crucial. See, “Force of Law” (1992). ↩︎
  25. Laclau, On Populist Reason (2005) ↩︎
  26. For example, in his 2003 book, Origins of Nazi Violence, Traverso systematically opposes the exceptionalist thesis regarding the horror of Nazi Germany and shows these horrors as deeply embedded in European culture (capitalism and industrial revolution).  ↩︎
  27. Among the infinite set of possible references, see the Cambridge edition of his pre-prison writing (1994). ↩︎

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