(New) Fascism

Contagion, Community, Myth

Bibliographic Data

ID19924985
AuthorsNidesh Lawtoo (0000-0003-0083-3208, corresponding author)
Year2019
Pages359
Publication date2019-08-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueFascism (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherMichigan State University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.14321/j.ctvj4swcr
OpenAlexW2966218657
Open LibraryOL34112927M
ISBN9781609176082
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited8

Readers beware: this is not your usual academic book.It is a very forceful, thought-provoking, and timely intervention in a political context dominated by the rise of new forms of fascism, notably in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world.Nidesh Lawtoo does not shy away from the term "fascism, " but he doesn't use it lightly.Rather, he shows how our usual "enlightened" political categories and refl exes prevent us from recognizing fascism in the fi rst place.For this political philosophy rooted in the subject of Aufk lrung, Lawtoo substitutes another, much less optimistic theoretical tradition, that of mimesis.For this longstanding tradition that goes all the way back to Plato's Republic, what we Moderns call the "subject" or x the "ego" is originally a copy, a shadow of other people.Far from being autonomous and "rational animals, " we are essentially social beings whose thoughts, but also behavior, character, aff ects, and desires are shaped mimetically-an age-old intuition that fi nds support, Lawtoo claims, in the recent discovery of "mirror neurons" that trigger the refl ex imitation of other people's gestures and expressions.Th e immediate implication of all this, as Plato well understood, is that we are fundamentally malleable, suggestible, and that this mimetic modeling is "beyond good and evil": it can be used to shape rational and ethical citizens, but it can also degenerate into irrational psychic contagion and mass hysteria-that is, into what late nineteenth-century theorists called "crowd psychology."Lawtoo expertly retraces the theories of the major proponents of the mimetic theory from Plato to Girard through Nietzsche, Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, and he shows how, taken together, they allow us to diagnose and understand the current fascist "pathology" much better than the usual liberal or progressive discourse.Lawtoo's will not be the fi rst book to cry "fascism" propos Th is book could not have been written without the long tradition of mimetic theorists on which it stands and the generous support of the European Research Council, which is currently funding the Homo Mimeticus (HOM) project, of which (New) Fascism is part.Given the genealogical method I inherit, I happily show my gratitude by acknowledging my debts to this mimetic tradition, quoting from its main advocates, while furthering their lines of thought.Th e

History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Fascism · Philosophy

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