Notes on late fascism

Abstract

This article proposes to think the present by refunctioning elements of some theories of fascism advanced in the twentieth century, from Bloch and Bataille to Adorno, Pasolini, Sartre and Banaji. Today, we are confronted with fascisms devoid either of mass movements that support them or of a revolutionary antagonist whom they confront. Contemporary or “late” fascism are rather best captured as projects that draw on racial fantasies of national rebirth, accompanied by a frenetic circulation of pseudo-classist discourses. The objective of these notes is to introduce an analysis of some of the elementary aspects of the current manifestations of fascism as a conservative politics of antagonistic reproduction, so as to rethink what a collective politics means today.