Samir Gandesha (Simon Fraser University/Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe)

Bush House (SE) 1.01, 15:00-17:00 

How might we come to terms with the rise of authoritarianism not just in the United States and Europe but also in the global south, in Turkey, Brazil, India, Egypt, among others? Is it helpful to think of this phenomenon in terms of the return of “fascism”? In order to provide a provisional answer to this question, this paper will sketch an account of the rise and consolidation fascism in the 1930s and then, against this picture, assess in what sense we can be said to confront fascism in the twenty-first century. Rather than being too hasty to assert that we are simply repeating and re-living the moment of Weimar, it is important to grasp both key discontinuities as well as continuities between that historical experience and our own conjuncture. 

My thesis shall be that a key discontinuity lies in the fact that while twentieth century fascism can be understood as the domination of financial by industrial capital, then “fascism” in the twenty-first century, is constituted by a precise reversal this relation. That is to say, contemporary fascism would have to be understood as constituted by the undisputed hegemony of finance. Such a reversal, moreover, entails the increasing use of debt as means of governance (Lazzarato) that relies not just on objective, coercive forms of control, i.e. the state and law, but subjective, consensual ones as well, i.e. the manipulation of the psychodynamics of guilt. What we see is an intensification of the structure of debt/guilt (Schulden/Schuld) that, as Theodor W. Adorno had already shown, lies at the heart of the authoritarian personality structure of late capitalist social relations. A key continuity is that fascism represents the application of colonial techniques of domination to Europe itself (Fanon/Arendt/Traverso). Contemporary fascism evinces a similar propensity of the state to apply colonial techniques of domination to its own subject populations, as is well exemplified in the case of the relation between the “Troika” and Greece. This is what Achille Mbembe has recently called the “becoming Black of the world.”

Samir Gandesha is Associate Professor of Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.  He is currently also Visiting Scholar at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany.