Fascism came out of the horrors of the First World War and drove the world into the even greater horrors of the Second World War. Arguably, however, fascism is more ubiquitous and elusive than historical dates suggest: it was prefigured in how early-modern authoritarian leaders agitated the masses (as analyzed by Max Horkheimer), in France's Second Empire Bonapartism (as analyzed by Karl Marx), and in Richard Wagner's intoxicating spectacle of the total work of art (as analyzed by Theodor Adorno). After fascism as a political movement was largely defeated, its theoretical value for understanding race, class, gender, and sexual domination in late-capitalist societies only increased, albeit in a fractured and often hazy way. Over the decades, the body of theoretical thought on fascism has grown to encompass not only its program, tactics, rhetoric, and organization, but also its aesthetics, psychology, and political economy. Because fascism, as Alberto Toscano observed, "is a matter of returns and repetitions," this course will study theories of fascism in thematic units rather than chronologically. Our focus will be on fascism's transatlantic dimension, and although it will include the writings of fascists agitators and philosophers (Mussolini, Evola, Heidegger), it will primarily draw on the traditions of Critical Theory, French post-war philosophy, and Black Radicalism; we will also study reevaluations of fascism in the context of its political, cultural, and intellectual resurgence over the last decade (Kelly, Seymour, Traverso, Toscano). |