Third Text

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Anti-fascism/Art/Theory

Angela Dimitrakaki & Harry Weeks

To cite this article: Angela Dimitrakaki & Harry Weeks (2019) Anti-fascism/Art/Theory, Third Text,
33:3, 271-292, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2019.1663679

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Sanja Iveković, ‘Aubra
Butorac’, from the series
GENXX, 1997–2001, detail
from installation in the
exhibition ‘Red Star Fear Not’,
curated by iLiana Fokianaki,
State of Concept, Athens, 2
March – 11 May 2019, image
courtesy of Sanja Iveković and
State of Concept, photograph:
Angela Dimitrakaki
1 Nicolas Allen and Martín
Cortés, ‘Fascisms Old and
New: An Interview with
Enzo Traverso’, Jacobin, 4
February 2019, https://
jacobinmag.com/2019/02/
enzo-traverso-post-fascism-
ideology-conservatism,
accessed 10 January 2019.
See also Enzo Traverso, The
New Faces of Fascism:
Populism and the Far Right,
Verso, London, 2019.
2 Ibid
Third Text, 2019
Vol. 33, No. 3, 271–292, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1663679
Anti-fascism/Art/Theory
An Introduction to What Hurts Us
Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks
Three Narratives
We will begin by stating the obvious. For reasons explained by many but
averted by none, the consolidation of global capitalism executed by neo-
liberalism has generated such levels of polarisation and discontent as to
have apparently raised fascism from the dead, and given it – besides elec-
toral purchase – an internet connection and a clickbait farm guaranteeing
followers in the millions. That is how one narrative goes.
According to another narrative, it is not spectral, or even zombie,
fascism that has entered the political room of the Global North while
sweeping very large territories of the Global South, but a new configur-
ation of authoritarianism and social hatred: Enzo Traverso, author of
The New Faces of Fascism (2019), speaks of ‘post-fascism’, arguing that
many of the authoritarian parties and rulers of the radical right do not
claim a connection with fascism:
On the one hand, the new far right is no longer fascist; on the other hand,
we cannot define it without comparing it with fascism. The new right is a
hybrid thing that might return to fascism, or it could turn into a new
form of conservative, authoritarian, populist democracy. The concept of
post-fascism tries to capture this.1
But at the same time, Traverso admits, ‘the new right is nationalist, racist,
and xenophobic’, to which, we would add, that it also tends to be attached
to strongman-type, ‘charismatic’ leadership.2 These are pretty solid attri-
butes of fascism, especially when they congeal into a violent discourse
identifying as a core cause ‘external’ and ‘internal’ enemies that must be
eclipsed. The violent discourse is accompanied by a practice: killing. The
far right has committed political assassinations, as in the cases of
© 2019 Third Text
273

Sanja Iveković, ‘Ljubica Gerovac’, from the series GENXX, 1997–2001


3 See Lois Beckett and Jason
Wilson, ‘“White Power
Ideology”: Why El Paso is
Part of a Global Threat’, The
Guardian, 5 August 2019,
https://www.theguardian.
com/us-news/2019/aug/04/
el-paso-shooting-white-
nationalist-supremacy-
violence-christchurch,
accessed 6 August 2019
4 See Tom Phillips, ‘Brazil’s
Bolsonaro Threatens Purge
of Left-wing “Outlaws”’,
The Guardian, 22 October
2018, https://www.
theguardian.com/world/
2018/oct/22/brazils-jair-
bolsonaro-says-he-would-
put-army-on-streets-to-fight,
and Michael Tackett,
‘Painting Socialists as
Villains, Trump Refreshes a
Blueprint’, The New York
Times, 6 February 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/
2019/02/06/us/politics/
socialism-donald-trump.
html, accessed 7 February
2019
5 Emma Graham-Harrison,
‘Thousands in Budapest
March against “Slave Law”
Forcing Overtime on
Workers’, The Guardian, 5
January 2019, https://www.
theguardian.com/world/
2019/jan/05/thousands-in-
budapest-march-against-
slave-law-forcing-overtime-
on-workers, accessed 7
February 2019
6 Jorge Martin, ‘Brazil:
General Strike Highlights
Bolsonaro’s Weakness’, In
Defence of Marxism, 15 June
2019, https://www.marxist.
com/brazil-general-strike-
highlights-bolsonaro-s-
weakness.htm, accessed 16
June 2019
7 Antonio Negri, ‘A 21st
Century Fascist’, Verso Blog,
16 January 2019, https://
www.versobooks.com/blogs/
4208-a-21st-century-fascist;
and Perry Anderson,
‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’, London
Review of Books, vol 4, no 3,
7 February 2019, pp 11–22,
also at https://www.lrb.co.
uk/v41/n03/perry-anderson/
bolsonaros-brazil, accessed 7
February 2019
8 Negri, ‘A 21st Century
Fascist’, op cit
274
Labour MP Jo Cox in the UK in 2016 and the pro-refugee politician
Walter Lübcke in Germany in 2019; and white supremacists and fascists
have killed groups of people designated as enemies – in 2011 in
Norway, seventy-seven people were murdered by Anders Breivik, who
wrote a long manifesto on his fascist politics, and in 2019 in New
Zealand, Brenton Tarrant killed fifty people in a mosque, praising both
Breivik and Trump as symbols of ‘renewed’ white identity in his own
manifesto, which was followed by the El Paso massacre in the USA and
yet another ‘white ideology’ manifesto.3 The internal enemies are familiar,
including, indicatively, ‘cultural Marxists’, those who threaten the
‘natural’ sexual order and hierarchy, those perceived as anti-nationalists,
the ‘Indigenous’ (the latter can also be othered as an ‘external enemy’), a
nebulous category such as ‘the Red outlaws’ for Brazil’s Bolsonaro and
plain ‘socialism’ for the USA’s Trump – threatening cultural, racial, and
also political purity. Such purity is a defence against any incipient chal-
lenge to what we would call the deep status quo as the known nexus of
oppression and exploitation.4 The anti-system rhetoric encountered in
the forces that align with a neo-fascist mentality is dedicated to preserving
the system’s fundamentals. And notably, the repudiation of liberalism –
indeed, of liberal democracy – is hardly incompatible with further oppres-
sion of the workers, and Orbán’s ‘slave law’ as better service for capital to
be provided by the enhanced powers of an anti-communist state demon-
strated just this.5 This is also why, on 14 June 2019, Bolsonaro was
faced with a massive general strike across 380 cities in Brazil.6
In a third narrative, Antonio Negri sets out openly the issue of ‘the
democratic path to fascism’, examining the process of Brazil’s recent ‘con-
stitutional coup d’état and/or a democratic coup d’état’ initiated long
before the recent election – the labyrinthine interweaving of global
capital into this political process is described at length by Perry Anderson.7
In this third narrative, we find a crucial observation:
We still have not asked: what is 21st century fascism? That of the 20th
century sought to destroy the Soviets, in Russia or in any other part of
the world where they could be found. Where are the Bolsheviks today?
They are obviously fantasies. But neoliberalism’s fatigue in consolidating
itself and the political crises that are added to the economic ones revive
the fear of Bolsheviks. That insistence is astounding.8
A strong reading of Negri’s remarks would lead us to see twenty-first-
century fascism as conservative prefigurative politics – a surprising diag-
nosis, given that ‘prefigurative politics’ has long been associated with
‘social experiments that both critique the status quo and offer alternatives
by implementing radically democratic practices in pursuit of social
justice’.9 A weaker reading of Negri’s remarks would lead us to see a pre-
ventive fascism.10 But we will not pursue here the implications of either
reading, for in both cases, we see the salient difference of the move
towards a contemporary fascism not in defeating an extant but an antici-
pated threat to the reproduction of the same. It follows that we see con-
temporary anti-fascism as a praxis that takes this condition seriously. It
is with this in mind that the present special issue has sought to bring
together critical reflections on how the terrain of art is implicated in all
275

Sanja Iveković, ‘Dragica Končar’, from the series GENXX, 1997–2001


9 Flora Cornish et al,
‘Rethinking Prefigurative
Politics: Introduction to the
Special Thematic Section’,
Journal of Social and
Political Psychology, vol 4,
no 1, 2016, pp 114–127,
Abstract
10 On the notion of an
‘incipient’ fascism and a
discussion of McCarthyism
and fascism, see James P
Cannon, ‘Fascism and the
Workers’ Movement’, The
Militant, 1954, on Marxists
Internet Archive, https://
www.marxists.org/
archive/cannon/works/
1954/mar/15.htm, accessed
9 June 2019. Cannon
(1890–1974) was a
Trotskyist and leader of the
Socialist Workers Party.
Herbert Marcuse also
wrote in 1971: ‘The ruling
class today… knows
perfectly well where the
enemy in its own country is.
The full weight of
repression is directed
against the Black and
Brown militants and
against the schools,
colleges, and universities. It
is not directed against
organized labor. It does not
have to be directed against
organized labour. This is
the counter-revolution – not
yet American fascism. We
are far from a fascist form
of government, but some of
the possible preconditions
are emerging.’ Marcuse
then goes on to list several
preconditions, noting the
absence, at the time, of ‘any
charismatic leader’. See
Herbert Marcuse, ‘The
Movement in a New Era of
Repression: An
Assessment’, lecture,
University of California,
Berkeley, 3 February 1971,
at https://www.marcuse.
org/herbert/pubs/
70spubs/70Move
mentEraRepression
BerkeleyJournal.pdf,
accessed 9 June 2019. We
are thankful to the article
reviewer for these and
additional references
through which the thread of
thought on preventive
fascism attached to the
crises of capitalism can be
followed.
276
this – a terrain extending from representational practices to institutional
formats to the more elusive processes of subject formation that gener-
ations of art theorists have elaborated; a terrain with a history (notably,
a social history) that might hold lessons. The debates around ‘fascism’
as an appropriate name for the change underway signal that we are
faced with a process of emergence, but to say this does not remove the
emergency in which we find ourselves.
What are the threads to be followed in putting forward the case for an
anti-fascist body of theory addressing the present – our social, economic,
political predicament – through art within a broader framework of cul-
tural production in which, by way of an example, alt-right memes are nor-
malised as social-media visual culture? The selection of responses to this
question that make up this special issue is incomplete as much as hetero-
geneous – the antithetical positions by two contributors on the question of
‘heroism’ as part of a contemporary anti-fascism across the art field and
society at large is but one example.11 To these two positions we would
add Croatian artist Sanja Iveković’s dedication to an anti-fascist politics
of memory where heroism paradigmatically moves from masculine to fem-
inine and from the singular to the plural. Iveković’s efforts are not limited
to keeping alive the heroic premise as belonging to the ‘ordinary’ people
(many of them women) who became the anti-fascist armies of the twenti-
eth century; rather, her extended engagement with anti-fascism both uses
mass-media tropes that force us to remember (commodities, for this is
what capitalist culture prizes) and exposes these tropes’ banalisation of
the memorable. In her GENXX series (1997–2001), the advertisement,
as the generic visual site for the over-circulation of youthful (and often
white) women’s images, is reclaimed as the memorial of anti-fascist her-
oines who sacrificed their youth and life: but if the heroines’ names
enter our field of vision, the small print telling their story epigrammatically
is at the bottom of the image and extremely easy to miss.12 Far then from
interpreting such heterogeneity of positions as a sign of the proverbial, and
by now parochial, open-endedness of an ‘autonomous’ art theory accord-
ing to the liberal script, we see it as a charting of the social experience that
subtends discrete yet related positions of critical left militancy which can
be generative of anti-fascist strategies.
In saying this, we are aware of the perceived risk of thinking about
anti-fascism in the art field as an inward-looking politics that can
exhaust itself in vigilance over the familiar (art) territory, thus allowing
for a certain enjoyment of one’s own anti-fascist position. Yet, by
saying ‘perceived risk’ we wish to differentiate our perspective from that
which perceives such a risk. If the title of our special issue is anti-
fascism/art/theory (as opposed to anti-fascist art theory), this is because
we wish to explore crossings and connections that might pertain to the
realisation of anti-fascism as a social force today, where the ‘social’
stretches from the economic to the cultural. This is not a matter of expand-
ing the scope of such a social force but of pushing for a collective under-
standing of what Alberto Toscano has called ‘the intensely superstructural
character of our present’s fascistic traits’, even if we would not see all
present fascist traits as superstructural.13 As a random selection, we
would not see as superstructural the connection of neo-fascism with the
economic sphere, the technological apparatus, carceral practices, the
racial violence of the anti-immigration camps and the border overall
277
11 The relevant articles are by
Ewa Majewska and Panos
Kompatsiaris.
12 Sanja Iveković’s efforts to
bring to life historical anti-
fascism is integral to her
critique of the
marginalisation of women’s
histories and the connection
she pursues between anti-
capitalist feminism today
and the heroism of anti-
fascist women in the past.
Curated by Iliana
Fokianaki, her exhibition
‘Red Star Fear Not’, at State
of Concept, Athens, 2
March – 11 May 2019,
included the collective
performance Whether We
Will Be Brave, in which
young women read out and
shared the experience of
women in the Greek
Resistance and exemplifies
her approach. See https://
stateofconcept.org/
exhibition/sanja-ivekovic/,
accessed 15 June 2019.
13 See Alberto Toscano,
‘Notes on Late Fascism’,
Historical Materialism
Blog, 2 April 2017, http://
www.historicalmaterialism.
org/blog/notes-late-fascism,
accessed 15 June 2019,
emphasis in the original.
14 Indicatively, see Claire
Provost, ‘Revealed: Trump-
linked US Christian
“Fundamentalists” Pour
Millions of “Dark Money”
into Europe, Boosting the
Far Right’, Open
Democracy, 27 March
2019, https://www.
opendemocracy.net/en/
5050/revealed-trump-
linked-us-christian-
fundamentalists-pour-
millions-of-dark-money-
into-europe-boosting-the-
far-right/, accessed 20 June
2019.
15 On this, see Angela
Dimitrakaki, ‘“Elections
Change Nothing”: On the
Misery of the Democracy of
Equivalence’, South as a
State of Mind 9,
Documenta 14, 1
November 2015, https://
www.documenta14.de/en/
south/53_elections_
change_nothing_on_the_
misery_of_the_democracy_
of_equivalence, accessed 9
(which is also class and gender violence), or the funding spree of the alt-
and Christian right set against ‘unnatural’ human rights.14 We therefore
hope that the analyses offered as part of this special issue can enable a criti-
cal interrogation of how the art field is implicated – in terms of collusion or
resistance – to the diffusion of ‘fascist traits’, irrespective of any further
classification of such traits. Can the legacy of the avant-gardes enable a
non-dogmatic anti-fascism? Are the political powers that art-institutional
philanthropy legitimises connected to fascism? Does the digital new order
give form and substance to a reactionary or even fascist imaginary? What
would it mean for art to work towards an anti-fascist public space and
public sphere, and what is the role of the critique of colonial violence in
such an effort? These are some of the questions/themes – not always
limited to the concerns of any one contributor – that indicate an anti-
fascist direction in art theory.
There are however elements in the art field that beg their description as
‘superstructural’ – indeed, the debates on critical ‘no-platforming’ versus
the liberal commitment to ‘free speech’ cannot be disassociated from the
discursive form so dear to the contemporary art field. Yet it is hard not
to see in this form the replication of a hegemonic model of democracy
in which all political positions (including the so called ‘far right’) are up
for discussion; all are presented as formally equivalent before an electorate
– which, faced with ‘choice’, can swing this or that way.15 Arguably, the
art field is a site where dialogue is perceived (again) to flow freely and at
some distance from the acute pressures of ‘real’ politics and the antagon-
isms of the social field. But we do not agree with this argument, for art has
always had a complicated relationship with the deepening of ideological
hegemony and efforts to undercut it, not to mention the diverse and asym-
metrical ways in which the art field inscribes a broader social experience.
With this in mind, we see the new terminology of ‘cancelling’ and ‘calling
out’ in circulation at present as ideological: that is, this language prioritises
atomised affect at the expense of what is politically at stake in opposing
what can amount to (but does not always) a reactionary leaning in.16
That such individualising/moralising terminology has become prevalent
at a time of major ideological conflict, confusion and tension should not
be missed – as individualising the ‘problem of fascism’ can go a long
way to numbing us to the processes through which fascism assembles its
required collective subjectivity as the supportive ground for its politics.17
The subtitle of this article – ‘An Introduction to What Hurts Us’ – brings
forth purposefully an ‘us’ (including the authors), proposed as a tentative
social collectivity precisely in order to disentangle ‘what hurts’ from the
ideology of atomised affect, and link it to the many, unequal ways in
which fascism, mobilising a supremacy ir/rationality, hurts a social body
already constituted through devastating hierarchies. (Initiatives such as
‘The Black Map of Athens’, realised with the help of artists, can show
this with precision.)18 In recognising that fascism hurts unequally, here
is nonetheless sought a politics of solidarity against fascist politics – and
we return to the complexity of what is sought at the closing of this Intro-
duction.
Notably, the art field has already responded to the emergent threat and
the emergency that has been brewing: indicatively, BAK (basis voor
actuele kunst) in the Netherlands initiated its four-year programme ‘Prop-
ositions for Non-Fascist Living’ in 2017; La Colonie in France organised
 278

June 2019; Bassam El events on ‘The White West’ in 2018 (The Resurgence of Fascism as a Cul-
Baroni, ‘The Post-Agonistic tural Force) and 2019 (The After-Life of Fascism); the Anti-fascist Year
Institution: What after
Mimesis and Critique of the
was initiated in Poland in 2019 with the involvement of art historians,
Democratic Project?’, in curators, artists, activists; also in Poland in 2019, the Museum of
Paul O’ Neill, Lucy Steeds Modern Art in Warsaw is staging the exhibition ‘Never Again. Art
and Mick Wilson, eds, How
Institutions Think: Between
against War and Fascism in the 20th and 21st Centuries’; in winter/
Contemporary Art and spring 2019, issue 12/13 of FIELD journal is titled ‘Art, Anti-Globalism,
Curatorial Discourse, and the Neo-Authoritarianism’ and guest-edited by Greg Sholette. Grant
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
The MIT Press and LUMA Kester, in his editorial, notes both that the root of neo-authoritarianism
Foundation and The Center is in ‘neo-liberal economic policies’ and the ‘projective identification
for Curatorial Studies, Bard with a “strong” leader in times of perceived crisis’ while Sholette, in his
College 2017; and Angela
Dimitrakaki, ‘Left with introductory essay, writes that ‘the world of cyberspace has energised a
TINA: Art, Alienation and very dark matter world of neo-fascists’.19 But he adds that:
Anti-communism’,
Praktyka Teoretyzcna, vol
1, no 31, 2019, pp 26–46, we would also be ill-advised if we forgot Antonio Gramsci’s legendary
http://serwer1745813.
home.pl/numery/PT_nr31_ statement regarding optimism of the will, a phrase he famously penned
2019_Anticommunisms_ while interned within a fascist prison cell just under a century ago as
Discourses_of_Exclusion/ global repression gave voice to a sublime resistance that went on to
02.Dimitrakaki.pdf, inspire millions in search of social justice. Our moment of tribulation is
accessed 9 June 2019.
no different.20
16 We attribute to ‘lean in’ the
negative meaning that the
many critics of Sheryl That, as two art historians who lived their western European child-
Sandberg’s book Lean In:
Women, Work and the Will
hoods between the 1970s and the 1990s, we have today to think about
to Lead, WH Allen/ anti-fascist strategies speaks volumes about the acceleration but also opa-
Penguin, London, 2013, queness of the processes that amount to ‘social experience’ since the end of
have attributed to it.
Indicatively, see Cinzia the Cold War. And we struggle with the current resonance of Georg
Arruzza, Tithi Lukács’s words written in the 1950s: ‘The contradiction whereby our
Bhattacharya and Nancy strategy and tactics were not determined by the fundamental opposition
Fraser, Feminism for the
99%: A Manifesto, Verso, of the epoch, the opposition between capitalism and socialism, but by
London 2019. Regarding that between fascism and anti-fascism, was a real historical contradiction,
the rise of affect ideology, an expression of the real historical movement.’21
we find an example in
Maiza Z Johnson’s article
‘6 Signs Your Call Out Is
about Your Ego and Not
Accountability’, Everyday States of Confusion: A Clarificatory Note on
Feminism Magazine, 6 May
2016, https://
Totalitarianism, Populism and Liberalism
everydayfeminism.com/
2016/05/call-out- As anti-fascist groups and initiatives multiply today in contexts as diverse
accountability/, accessed 15 as Warsaw, London and Athens (and that is just in Europe), what are
June 2019. The article title
mimics titles of romantic Lukács’s words warning us about? Joining the dots from the ‘de-commu-
relationship advice pieces nisation’ delirium of the authoritarian regimes of the former Eastern bloc
and the text includes
phrases such as ‘in many
in Europe (with its fetishistic removal of ‘communist’ public art and its
ways, holding each other typical replacement with sculptures of saints and Nazi collaborators) to
accountable has come to Trump and Bolsonaro’s preoccupation with the ‘red threat’ points to a
mean punishing each
other’, ‘hurt feelings’, and
social field where the chief twentieth-century battle line is re-drawn:
how to avoid ‘publicly between capitalism and its negation. To be sure, on this basic battle line
shaming’ – say, of a fellow a more complex game is being played today, as much as it was by
activist as no one is
‘perfect’. Without doubting
earlier iterations of ‘the fascist matrix’ (to use another of Traverso’s
the article’s good notable concepts): to appeal to voters ravaged by neoliberalism, protec-
intentions, focused on not tionism and welfare strictly for the nation is a popular and populist
alienating people in activist
circles, we are concerned remedy (Poland’s PiS), but more neoliberalism for national growth (Bolso-
about the replacement of naro) is also a reasonable choice. In both cases, the familiar battle line
279
critique, opposition,
dissent, and genuine
political disagreement
within a progressive
political community with
the notion of
accountability-as-
punishment-and-public-
shaming. Terms such as
‘call out’ or ‘cancel culture’
(for this is what we are
criticising) push in the latter
direction, threatening to
reduce political differences
to disputes among, or
about, individuals.
17 This individualising and
moralising tendency is
manifest in, and defining of,
Nina Power’s blog text
‘Cancelled’. The text
accuses the ‘fragile cobweb
called something like “the
left” or “the artworld” or
“antifa” or just “people we
know and like”’ for
stopping being ‘friends’
with people that they ‘don’t
like, or once knew and liked
and now don’t like’. The
same text relies strongly on
the human nature
argument, examined later
in this Introduction,
according to which ‘we are
all individually possessed of
the capacity to be fascist’
(emphasis added). The text
concludes by reiterating
and affirming the illusion of
practising autonomy and
freedom on a personal level
– ‘To be autonomous – to
decide for oneself, to govern
oneself, to live without
authority, to live truly
without the policeman in
our head’ – disregarding
completely the material
conditions that make
possible this illusion as a
racial, class, and gender
privilege (to mention just
the obvious). See Nina
Power, ‘Cancelled’, 6 April
2019, https://ninapower.
net/2019/04/06/cancelled/,
accessed 24 June 2019.
18 See ‘X Them Out – The
Black Map of Athens’,
https://www.
humanrights360.org/x-
them-out-the-black-map-
of-athens/, accessed 24 June
2019
19 See Grant Kester, ‘Editorial,
winter/spring 2019’, and
remains undisturbed. We would not go so far as to say that capitalism’s
reproduction has, in this historical juncture, dictated a partial withdrawal
from full-steam globalisation; but we would say that in the newer ‘new
world order’ the illusion that capitalism is best served by liberal democ-
racy is shattered. Terms such as ‘post-democracy’, coined before the
global financial crisis of 2008, indicate exactly that.22 It is then in the dura-
tional event of this shattering where we encounter a long list of fascist
attributes: violent xenophobia underpinned by racial and/or cultural
supremacy narratives and the peculiar combination of a manic safeguard-
ing of good-old-days lifestyles with an embracing of a technological
apparatus promising a new dawn for eugenics imagined, enabled, and
in the service of the full freedom of capital.
Yet, already in 1979 Stuart Hall wrote about his own times, and
Britain in particular, where fascism was also alarming the left:
What we have to explain is a move toward ‘authoritarian populism’ – an
exceptional form of the capitalist state – which, unlike classical fascism,
has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institution
in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around
itself an active popular consent. This undoubtedly represents a decisive
shift in the balance of hegemony, and the National Front has played a
‘walk-on’ part in this drama. It has entailed a striking weakening of demo-
cratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension. We may miss precisely
what is specific to this exceptional form of the crisis of the capitalist state by
mere name-calling.23
Hall was writing about contradictions within democracy, and pursued
an analysis of the territories where the right had come to dominate – edu-
cation being, significantly, one of them. But although the ‘swing to the
right’ Hall spoke of is indisputably present in our times too, we encounter
it as a transnational order in which neoliberalism is not at its beginning, as
in the 1970s, but at its consummation and crisis. Without even mentioning
all that has happened since 1979, the ‘swing to the right’ seems now to
describe less the move of a pendulum (that might swing the other way)
and more of a cumulative effect of successive ‘swings to the right’ (with
the occasional ‘left parenthesis’) pushing us more and more in the direc-
tion of a fascist effect to be felt socially where circumstances demand it.
Besides this, as put by Larne Abse Gogarty in the roundtable discussion
closing this special issue, self-identified fascists actually exist today.
They exist in many parts of the world. We see their existence grounded
in the operation of fascism as propositional politics, as a vision about
how the world should be, which is why the prospect of socialism and
the ‘red threat’ must not be allowed to exist; and this vision must be
made acceptable and desirable through various channels. In this respect,
populism must be seen as a possible channel for and vector of neo-
fascism rather than neo-fascism being seen as a necessary expression
and outcome of populism.
Anything and everything can be weaponised in this flexible war:
‘women’s rights’ can be mobilised to unleash rampant Islamophobia
and assure the nation of its civilisational supremacy, or, conversely,
women can be ordered back to their ‘traditional’ role of breeding for
the nation.24 This example, drawn from the complex assemblage that

Greg Sholette, ‘Optimism of
the Will: 2018 FIELD
Reports on the Global
Resistance to
Neoreactionary
Nationalism’, both in
FIELD 12/13, winter/
spring 2019, http://field-
journal.com/editorial/field-
issue-12-13-editorial and
http://field-journal.com/
editorial/optimism-of-the-
will-2018-field-reports-on-
the-global-resistance-to-
neoreactionary-
nationalism, accessed 9
June 2019
20 Sholette, ibid
21 Lukács quoted by Franco
Fortini in ‘The Mandate of
Writers and the End of
Antifascism’, in Franco
Fortini, A Test of Powers:
Writings on Criticism and
Literary Institutions, trans
Alberto Toscano, Chicago
University Press, Chicago,
2016, p 228. The quote is
from Georg Lukács, ‘Der
Kampf des Fortschritts und
der Reaktion in der
heutigen Kultur’, Aufbau,
September 1956.
22 See Colin Crouch, Post-
democracy, Polity,
Cambridge, 2004
23 Stuart Hall, ‘The Great
Moving Right Show’,
Marxism Today, January
1979, p 15
24 On the linking of women’s
rights and Islamophobia in
Europe, see Sara Farris, In
the Name of Women’s
Rights: The Rise of
Femonationalism, Duke
University Press, Durham,
North Carolina, 2017.
25 Eric Levitz, ‘With Trump’s
Migrant Camps, the
History We Should Fear
Repeating Is Our Own’,
New York Intelligencer, 20
June 2019, http://nymag.
com/intelligencer/2019/06/
aoc-holocaust-why-
migrant-detention-centers-
are-concentration-camps-
explained.html, accessed 28
June 2019
26 Ibid. The article author lists
the range of reactions to
Ocasio-Cortez’s words,
including those of
‘Republicans, and many
280
takes us from ‘blood and soil’ (Nazi Germany) to ‘blood and honour’
(Golden Dawn in Greece), reveals that a certain degree of ideological con-
fusion is a sine qua non of the contemporary fascist scape – but then again,
did not the word ‘socialism’ feature in the National Socialist German
Workers’ (‘Nazi’) Party? Yet we would contend that precisely because
populism can be a vector for neo-fascism, the latter is not just encountered
in far-right parties, platforms and formations; rather, its ideological
project, its system of values, can be carried more successfully through
more mainstream contexts. The fascist effect can become acceptable if
channelled through the mainstream Republican Party in the USA: this is
why Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said that ‘the White
House is “running concentration camps” on our nation’s southern
border – and that those who believe “‘Never again’ means something”
must oppose Donald Trump’s “fascist presidency”.’25 That her words
were debated by those who do not live (and suffer and die) through the
fascist effect is symptomatic of how the politics of acceptance works.26
As Ana Teixeira Pinto put it in an article tellingly titled ‘Artwashing –
on NRx and the Alt Right’, the issue ‘is not whether to engage with
[Nick] Land’s writings, but about recognizing that institutions institute:
hosting the good Land has the unwelcoming effect of rendering the bad
Land respectable – influential even’.27 In this regard, the ideological con-
fusion we are witnessing demands indeed that we ‘ask how memories,
rhetorics, and symbols derived from the fascist and National Socialist
era, among other sources, help constitute new political subjects in this
moment of danger – regardless of whether they are ultimately best
described as fascist themselves’.28 Our problem is not (yet; or only) the
political parties of clear allegiance to fascism’s propositional politics;
our problem, acknowledged by contributors to this special issue, is what
makes fascist traits acceptable, normal, commonsense; or exciting,
cheeky, liberating; or needed, welcome-in-the-end, a (final) solution.
Can fascist traits today be registered in, and across, such different orien-
tations? Yes, they can.
And if we are bemused by black men and lesbians joining the alt- or far
right today, what about the fact that ‘the first Briton to lead an avowedly
fascist organization was a woman named Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the
founder of the British Fascisti’ in 1923?29 Lest the familiar, aforemen-
tioned battle line be forgotten, this female admirer of war and Mussolini
also thought that ‘Britain was being ruined by foreigners and communists
who could only be stopped by the decisive actions of brave patriots pre-
pared to decry the shibboleths of liberal democracy.’30 Or, how about
the suffragette Mary Richardson who famously attacked Velázquez’s
Rokeby Venus, in protest ‘against the Government destroying Mrs Pan-
khurst… the most beautiful character in modern history’ and, less
famously, joined the British Union of Fascists in 1933? The ‘most beautiful
character in modern history’ and leader of the Women’s Social and Politi-
cal Union, Emmeline Pankhurst, displayed herself adequate anti-Bolshe-
vism, anti-trade-unionism and manly, imperial patriotism during WWI
while remaining a staunch fighter for women’s rights.31
The very sketchy outline, then, of the contradictions of the contempor-
ary fascist tendency, evident when considering the perplexing production
of the neo-fascist subject, are not unprecedented. Arthur Rosenberg’s bril-
liant ‘Fascism as a Mass Movement’ (1934) excavates a fascist lineage that
281
Jewish-American
organizations’ that ‘then
excoriated the
congresswoman for
(supposedly) demeaning the
memory of the 6 million
Jews who ‘were
exterminated in the
Holocaust’.
27 Ana Teixeira Pinto,
‘Artwashing – on NRx and
the Alt Right’, Texte zur
Kunst, 4 July 2017, https://
www.textezurkunst.de/
articles/artwashing-web-de/,
accessed 19 June 2019.
Teixeira Pinto looks at the
imbrication of Land’s
theories with contexts of
power, noting: ‘The overlap
between Landian theory
and the [Silicon] Valley’s
political agenda is not
coincidental. “The Dark
Enlightenment” [written by
Land], which the NRx takes
as its foundational text, is
basically Land infusing
theoretical jargon into
Yarvin/Moldbug’s blog
“Unqualified
Reservations”. Yarvin’s
Tlon (corporate vehicle for
Urbit, his open-source
computing platform) is
backed by PayPal founder
and Trump advisor Peter
Thiel, who is known for his
antidemocratic activism.
Cyberlibertarian views and
Land’s brand of
transhumanism are
pervasive throughout the
tech industry’ and ‘Land is
not a nihilist, he is a
moralist, à la Ayn Rand; his
version of the Singularity –
the evolutionary threshold
when AI overcomes and
hence overwhelms human
intelligence – is just
capitalist eschatology.
Humanity will not so much
become extinct as split into
two divergent strains: the
tech-savvy super rich, who
will biotechnologically
mutate into a transhuman
super-race; and the other
99%, the refuse of
evolutionary history’.
28 Neil Levi and Michael
Rothberg, ‘Memory Studies
in a Moment of Danger:
Fascism, Postfascism, and
the Contemporary Political
Imaginary’, Memory
Studies, Vol 11, Issue 3,
takes us back to the nineteenth century, the century that formed modern
art.32 Fascism is an intricate edifice of seduction, very much resting on
fantasy and desire as a dialectic between absolute surrender to power
and the claim of absolute power. As is well known, the master of diffused
power analysis, Michel Foucault, regarded fascism as the key ‘adversary’
to be potentially found within any and every subject.33 Although this pos-
ition on fascism does not fully represent Foucault’s thought on the matter,
it remains a popular one – and, in our times, one serving the distortion of
fascism into an aptitude of a generic human psyche that can allegedly be
made manifest across the political spectrum.34 We find this formulation
problematic, given that fascism refuses to remain contained at the level
of fantasy but implements the right to cathartic (Greek for ‘cleansing’) vio-
lence while it is also articulated as power over a meticulously crafted
‘other’ imbued with inferiority but simultaneously posing a colossal
threat deserving of annihilation. The monstrous extermination of the
‘inferior’ Jewish people in the camps, along with the Roma, the commu-
nists and the homosexuals, as threats to the purity of a ‘natural’ order,
has not been enough to prevent the persistent anti-Semitism of our times
– or the demonisation of Muslims and its impact on thousands of refugees.
If anything, the logic that sees an inferior-yet-threatening other is scripted
as a new, open legitimacy of power and, specifically, of power as violence
that guarantees exclusive historical representation.35
What are we to make of all this, at the centre of which we find a return
to the glorification of applied power? If that is the issue, should we not be
talking about totalitarianism? That would bring us in line with the narra-
tive formally adopted by the European Union, which voted for A Day of
Remembrance of the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism (23 August, date of
the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) on 2 April 2009 and flagged up tota-
litarianism with Hannah Arendt as its guiding light. Very few voices rose
to protest against the historical revisionism in the context of which com-
munism was equated with Nazism and fascism:
… the pact of August 1939 was a shocking act of realpolitik by the state
that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil
war… But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the
scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar ‘enslavement’ of
eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a menda-
city that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that
could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red
Army in 1945.36
We are not certain this revisionism, under the conceptual hegemony of
totalitarianism, is a ‘mistake’, insofar as it is adopted by a European Union
whose track record on neoliberal policies of mass austerity and debt
extraction jar with its commitment to democracy – it was only in 2015
when we heard the German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble
declaring: ‘Elections change nothing. There are rules.’37 And it was Die
Welt, the newspaper close to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat govern-
ment, in which Schäuble was Minister of Finance, which also in 2015
returned to Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer’s theory to suggest that contempor-
ary Greece (for which elections would indeed change nothing) was in fiscal
meltdown because its inhabitants were not Greeks (whatever that might

2018, pp 335–367, here p
257
29 Julie Wheelwright, ‘Colonel
Barker: A Case Study in the
Contradictions of Fascism’,
Historical Studies in
Ethnicity, Migration and
Diaspora, vol 8, no 1–2,
1989, pp 40–48. See also
Arwa Mahdawi, ‘The
Troubling Ascent of the
LGBT Right Wing’, The
Guardian, 26 October
2017, https://www.
theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2017/oct/
26/ascent-lgbt-right-wing-
afd, accessed 10 April 2019
30 Edward White,
‘Conservatism with Knobs
On’, The Paris Review, 2
December 2016, https://
www.theparisreview.org/
blog/2016/12/02/
conservatism-with-knobs-
on/, accessed 10 March
2019
31 Philip McCouat, ‘From the
Rokeby Venus to Fascism’,
Journal of Art in Society,
2016, http://www.
artinsociety.com/from-the-
rokeby-venus-to-fascism-
pt-1-why-did-suffragettes-
attack-artworks.html,
accessed 5 March 2019. For
a critical discussion of
British fascism in relation to
women, feminism and
gender, see Martin
Durham, ‘Gender and the
British Union of Fascists’,
Journal of Contemporary
History, vol 27, 1992, pp
513–529.
32 Arthur Rosenberg, ‘Fascism
as a Mass Movement’,
Historical Materialism
(1934), vol 20, no 1, 2012,
pp 144–189
33 See Michel Foucault,
‘Preface’, in Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen
R Lane, University of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1983, p xiii.
Originally published in
French in 1972.
34 For a more expanded view
on Foucault’s thought on
fascism, see ‘Anti-Retro:
Michel Foucault in
282
be) but rather ‘a mix of Slavs, Byzantines and Albanians’ (whatever that
might be too) – commentators did not miss the ‘distinct whiff of Nazi ideol-
ogy in these racist assertions’.38 The ‘increasing criminalisation of migrant
solidarity in Europe’, a continent for which new maps are produced to mark
the intended tragedy of refugee and migrant camps and limbo zones, adds to
a picture where the normalisation of the de-humanisation of a specified
Other evokes mid-twentieth-century horrors.39 And in witnessing with
alarm the EU’s current unravelling, we are hearing with equal alarm the
arrogance of the status quo intelligentsia when they announce that ‘the
idea of Europe is in peril’ by ‘populist wreckers’ and this idea must now
‘ward off the new signs of totalitarianism’; that is all in a manifesto that
forgets the entire history of European colonialism and its genocides, pre-
senting the continent as a haven of untainted emancipation heralded by
white men (specifically, Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius).40
We hardly need to dig up Slavoj Žižek’s Did Somebody Say Totalitar-
ianism? (2011) to remember the use of the term in Cold War propaganda.
This was woven into a revelatory exhibition about the ideological trajec-
tory of the art field in the second half of the twentieth century called ‘Para-
politics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War’ (November 2017 – January
2018, HKW, Berlin), curated by Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz
Guevara and Antonia Majaca. The curators revisited the history of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in West Berlin in 1950 to ‘con-
solidate an “anti-totalitarian” intellectual community’ but eventually
found to have been secretly funded by the CIA and ‘enlisted in shoring
up an anti-Communist consensus in the service of US hegemony’.
However, the aspect of this curatorial research most relevant to our
aims in preparing this special issue is found in the assertion that anti-tota-
litarianism as covert anti-communism ‘reflects the ideological foundations
of the conflict lines of today’s global contemporary art’.41 By ‘art’ we
understand ‘the art field’, evidently resting on the consensus of liberalism
as the justification of an economic structure that accommodates collectors
with off-shores, trustees who profit from state violence (the Warren
Kanders case is illuminating), philanthropy from private capital (such as
the Sacklers, until recently), vast precarity of most of the workforce
(that fails to live up to the entrepreneurial ideal), the class practice
called gentrification, and generally a state of affairs that comes as part
and parcel of neoliberalism.42 As explained by Nizan Shaked:
Liberalism, in its Keynesian capitalist version, held political belief in the
power of reform. Since the election of Trump for office, reformists in the
art world have recast themselves as the resistance. But they ignore a historical
fact: liberalism has been dead since Thatcher and Reagan killed it in 1979/
1980, and diverted liberalism to the free market doctrine of Friedrich
Hayek. It is neoliberalism that has since reigned supreme. To be a liberal
today is to take the side of economic neoliberalism, where deregulation, pri-
vatization, and financialization – which rely on globalization, militarization,
and imperialism, stoked by and fueling racism, xenophobia, and nationalism
– have in concert driven economic inequality to unprecedented extremes.43
By no absurd coincidence, this structural condition of the art field is
noted, and contextualised in different ways, in at least three contributions
to this special issue: Shaked’s own, in which the term ‘econo-fascism’ is
283

Interview’, ONSCENES, 4
November 2017 (interview
conducted by Pascal
Bonitzer and Serge
Toubiana and first
published in French at
Cahiers du Cinema, vol 251
no 2, July/August 1974),
https://onscenes.weebly.
com/film/anti-retro-michel-
foucault-in-interview#,
accessed 9 June 2019.
coined to capture the imbrication of the US art philanthropy infrastructure
with Trump’s election to the presidency; Ewa Majewska’s, in which anti-
fascist struggle is connected with Polish art workers’ initiatives against the
sector’s precarisation; and the roundtable discussion by Larne Abse
Gogarty, Angela Dimitrakaki and Marina Vishmidt, which opens by
noting the inherent, if historically determined, ‘right-wing-ness’ of the
art field and proceeds by questioning the efficacy of an art-world-based
anti-fascism if situated within the ‘business as usual’ modus operandi of
the sector.

35 Netanyahu’s memorable
tweet, ‘The weak crumble,
are slaughtered and erased The Dis/continuities of (Anti-)fascism
from history while the
strong, for good or ill,
survive. The strong are German Marxist Karl Korsch wrote in the face of the Fall of France in
respected, and alliances are 1940 that:
made with the strong, and
in the end peace is made
with the strong’ (29 August
2018) exemplifies this
The main deficiency of the Marxian concept of the counterrevolution is
embracing and justification that Marx did not, and from the viewpoint of his historical experience
of power, with war on the could not, conceive of the counterrevolution as a normal phase of social
agenda (hence the reference development. Like the bourgeois liberals he thought of the counterrevolu-
to ‘peace’). PM of Israel,
tion as an ‘abnormal’ temporary disturbance of a normally progressive
Twitter Post, 29 August
2018, 6:05pm. development.44
36 Seumas Milne, ‘This
Rewriting of History is Under contemporary conditions – informed by the ‘End of History’
Spreading Europe’s Poison’,
The Guardian, 9 September (that refuses to come), de-communisation, and the allegedly post-political
2009, https://www. ‘capitalist realism’ of the 1990s and 2000s – it is as difficult as it is incor-
theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2009/sep/
rect to view what we might call our current counterrevolution as any kind
09/second-world-war- of deviation from the normal way of things.45 To talk about counterrevo-
soviet-pact, accessed 9 lution might sound a tad hyperbolic, but the waves of post-2008 anti-capi-
February 2019
talist insurgents were not limited to 2011 or Occupy or the Arab Spring;
37 Gavin Hewitt, ‘Greece: The they have led all the way to a resolutely anti-capitalist feminism of global
Dangerous Game’, BBC
News, 1 February 2015,
potential, while the ongoing, at the time of writing, Yellow Vests move-
https://www.bbc.com/ ment in France is showing the depth of discontent with capital accumu-
news/world-europe- lation beyond the far right’s opportunistic, anti-system theatrics.46 The
31082656, accessed 8 April
2019 preventive function of neo-fascism, or even neo-authoritarianism, and
the theories of supremacy in support of ‘capitalist eschatology’ (see foot-
38 Johannes Stern, ‘Racism
and Arrogance: Anti-Greek note 27) are not unconnected either to the projected threat of oppositional
Agitation in the German social movements that the crisis of neoliberalism is strengthening and re-
Media’, World Socialist orientating, or to the risk posed by spontaneous uprisings casting doubt
Web Site, 18 July 2015,
https://www.wsws.org/en/ on the legitimacy of the deeper status quo and, in Rosa Luxemburg’s
articles/2015/07/18/germ- words, by ‘the great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle
j18.html, accessed 8 April
2019
seeking its way forward’.47 The crucial lesson of Korsch, that to dismiss
fascism as a simple aberration is to misrepresent its very material traction,
39 See Martina Tazzioli,
‘Migration: New Map of
is vital today. Thus, it is absolutely fundamental to a truly materialist anti-
Europe Reveals New fascism that we attend not simply to the 1930s, as the great historical pre-
Frontiers for Refugees’, The cursor to the present efforts to update counterrevolution, but to the dis/
Conversation, 9 October
2018, https://
continuities that tie the 1930s to the present or complicate the relationship
theconversation.com/ between these two eras.
migration-new-map-of- Harry Weeks’s contribution to this issue returns to Georges Bataille’s
europe-reveals-real-
frontiers-for-refugees- theorisations of fascism in the 1930s, and the controversy around this
103458, accessed 8 April intellectual endeavour, in order to illuminate current perplexities. Benja-

2019. See also Daniel
Boffey and Lorenzo Tondo,
‘Captain of Migrant Rescue
Ship Says Italy
“Criminalising Solidarity”’,
The Guardian, 15 June
2019, https://www.
theguardian.com/world/
2019/jun/15/captain-of-
migrant-rescue-ship-says-
italy-criminalising-
solidarity, accessed 28 June
2019.
40 Bernard-Henri Lévy, Milan
Kundera, Salman Rushdie,
Elfriede Jelinek, Orhan
Pamuk et al, ‘Fight for
Europe – or the Wreckers
Will Destroy It’, The
Guardian, 25 January
2019, https://www.
theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2019/jan/
25/fight-europe-wreckers-
patriots-nationalist,
accessed 9 February 2019
41 See https://www.hkw.de/en/
programm/projekte/2017/
parapolitics/parapolitics_
start.php, accessed 9
February 2019
42 How capital in the
supposedly liberal art field
is connected with
authoritarianism and
practices of suppression in
the social field is a core
concern for anti-fascism. In
the summer of 2019, ‘the
head of the Serpentine
Galleries [London]…
resigned after the Guardian
revealed she is the co-owner
of an Israeli cyberweapons
company whose software
has allegedly been used by
authoritarian regimes to
spy on dissidents’. See Jon
Swaine, Stephanie
Kirchgaessner and Patrick
Greenfield, ‘Serpentine
Galleries Chief Resigns in
Spyware Firm Row’, The
Guardian, 18 June 2019,
https://www.theguardian.
com/artanddesign/2019/
jun/18/serpentine-galleries-
chief-yana-peel-resigns-in-
spyware-firm-row, accessed
18 June 2019. In
connection with Warren
Kanders and the Whitney
Biennial 2019, see Hannah
Black, Ciarán Finlayson,
and Tobi Haslett, ‘The Tear
Gas Biennial’, Artforum, 17
July 2019, https://www.
284
min Noys’s observation that ‘the 1930s are not in fact over, in the sense
that what was at stake… is still to be thought’, cited in the article,
echoes a sentiment that has become widespread well beyond academia
since the financial crisis of 2008 and throughout its ongoing ramifica-
tions.48 Rather than following the Foucauldian mindset, mentioned
earlier, according to which fascism can be the unacknowledged, diffused,
internalised adversary, the argument pursued by Weeks effectively asks
whether Bataille can help us investigate this adversary so as to delimit
his (sic) psychological specificity as precisely not a generality. (Bataille’s
‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ appeared in 1933). The argu-
ment’s proposition to differentiate between ‘analysis’ and ‘appropriation’
in considering the adversary’s ‘weapons’ touches on one of the most divi-
sive issues for contemporary anti-fascists, in the art field as much as any-
where. For to say that fascism relies strongly on affect for its appeal hardly
negates the material, socio-economic grounds of fascism (Bataille was
interested in what produces the ‘unity’ of fascism); but it is a moot and
for many contentious point whether anti-fascists should rely on affect.
The question is how to disentangle affect as a component of a political
strategy from processes of mystification that should be repudiated by a
left whose task is the very de-mystification of the conditions that enable
fascism – hence our concerns, expressed earlier, about an ideology of ato-
mised affect.
Yet the task of de-mystification should not be reducible to certainty –
certainty, that is, as a singular path led by modalities of conviction that
turn the relationship between political principle and historical process
into a confrontation that resembles a football match. In relation to this
risk, the twentieth century also requires critical exploration. Focusing
on the political function of doubt, Esther Leslie speaks, in her article, of
‘returns’, this time through reference to Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benja-
min, as historical lessons that might ‘make practical sense for anti-fascist
mobilisation’. She also prioritises those connecting strands that run
through the second half of the twentieth century, such as the anti-fascist
poetry of Italian (and Jewish) communist Franco Fortini. The question
of populism, and especially a populism that engages popular culture, is
at the core of her analysis. A number of concerns are outlined by Leslie,
among which the following two deserve, in our view, closer attention.
First, how doubt functioning against dogmatism and its blinding effects
would not undermine the commitment to truth. Second, how doubt is con-
nected with ‘the appropriation of certain avant-garde tactics by a new
right that is fluent in pranking, ironic memes, disjunctive collage and the
like’, as put by Leslie. Admittedly, we see the situation as rather worse –
although the inclusion of the word ‘despair’ by Leslie in the title of her
article suggests she might concur with us in saying that the conflation of
doubt with the relativisation of truth as irreducibly positional has been
the hegemonic ideology that has given us contemporary art and art
theory as we know it. Emancipatory art movements, such as the feminist
art movement, that emerged post-1968, became trapped in the contradic-
tion of arguing the truth of their cause while being historically forced to
prioritise methodologies that aligned, knowingly or not, with postmo-
dernism’s enshrining of inconclusiveness and semiotic instability. This
was postmodernism’s peculiar yet convincing allegiance to ‘freedom’ as
the hallmark of Western-ness to be envied by the culturally (and in the
285
artforum.com/slant/a-
statement-from-hannah-
black-ciaran-finlayson-and-
tobi-haslett-on-warren-
kanders-and-the-2019-
whitney-biennial-80328,
accessed 20 July 2019.
43 Nizan Shaked, ‘Why I Am
Resigning from X-TRA
Contemporary Art
Quarterly and the Problem
with 356 Mission’s
Politics’, Hyperallergic, 27
April 2018, https://
hyperallergic.com/440234/
x-tra-contemporary-art-
quarterly-356-mission-
boyle-heights/, accessed 5
March 2019
44 Karl Korsch, ‘The Fascist
Counter-revolution’, in
Living Marxism, vol 5, no
2, autumn 1940, pp 29–37,
available at https://www.
marxists.org/archive/
korsch/1940/fascist-
counterrrevolution.htm,
accessed 18 August 2019
45 We borrow the useful term
‘capitalist realism’ from
Mark Fisher’s influential
book of the same title. See
Mark Fisher, Capitalist
Realism, Zero Books,
Ropley, 2009.
46 See Arruzza, Bhattacharya
and Fraser, Feminism for
the 99%: A Manifesto, op
cit. We place emphasis on
the Yellow Vests here
because, at the time of
writing, it is the most
notable uprising in Europe
against the impact of ‘thirty
years of neoliberalism,
topped up by eighteen
months of Macron’s rabid
social warfare’, with
Macron representing
‘normality’ in the neoliberal
consensus in the continent
overall. See Frédéric
Lordon, ‘End of the
World?’, Verso Blog, 7
December 2018, https://
www.versobooks.com/
blogs/4153-end-of-the-
world, accessed 9 June
2019.
47 Luxemburg quoted in Andy
Merrifield, Magical
Marxism: Subversive
Politics and the
Imagination, Pluto, London
2011, p 83. The quote is
from Rosa Luxemburg,
end, politically) disadvantaged. And it is often forgotten that both May
‘68 and the feminist art movement, as formations of revolutionary agita-
tion, were nonetheless engulfed by the Cold War as the overarching setting
for the cardinal ideological battle of the second half of the twentieth
century, as discussed earlier.
We cannot then over-emphasise the political imperative, for an art
theory that seeks to contribute to anti-fascism as a social (and therefore
also cultural) force, of re-examining how a bad-‘neo-conservative’ and a
good-‘poststructuralist’ postmodernism, in a differentiation drawn by
Hal Foster in the mid-1980s, both became implicated in figurations of
doubt that congealed into capitalism’s usurpation of anti-dogmatism.49
This usurpation has authorised the doxa of neo/liberalism as an idea
(obscuring neo/liberalism as a materially embedded class project) and
the fashionable political libertarianism of the day which instructs: any-
thing goes, and that’s democracy! Foster himself was not blind to this pro-
spect, as he subverted his own critical differentiation by contending that
the two postmodernisms were, in most cases, just the one – for, as he
put it, ‘how does (poststructuralist) textuality differ from (neoconserva-
tive) pastiche as a form of representation?’50 He answered as follows:
do these opposed practices of textuality and pastiche differ in any deep epis-
temic way? Whatever else is claimed for them, is not the subject decentred,
representation disentrenched, and the sense of history, of the referent,
eroded in both?… If this is the case, then the neoconservative ‘return’ to
the subject, to representation, to history may be revealed – historically, dia-
lectically – to be one with the poststructuralist ‘critique’ of the same. In
short, pastiche and textuality may be symptoms of the same ‘schizophrenic’
collapse of the subject and of historical narrativity – as signs of the same
process of reification and fragmentation under late capitalism. And if
these two models of postmodernism, so opposed in style and politics, are
indeed historically one, then we need to consider more deeply what
(post)modernism might be.51
This consideration, long overdue, must now happen in the conditions
of postmodernism’s own mutation into the exhumation of Julius Evola’s
recombinant occult fascism and its legitimisation as ironic neo-reaction
to be consumed as, well, aesthetic pleasure brought to you by art.52 As
part of the same mutation, and as documented in the art press, we have
a gallery putting up a show, the title of which registers as an ableist slur
on a named Jewish artist and including an ‘ironic’ sculpture called
Tankie Meme (Blacked): while ‘tankie’ is pejorative slang for pro-Soviet
Union communists, this is a caricature of a ‘black-clad figure with a
bushy beard and bulbous, pink nose’ and with hammer-and-sickle
eyes.53 It is unsurprising that some (including the targeted Jewish artist)
connected it to a particular brand of anti-Semitism known as ‘Judeo-Bol-
shevism’ that once united the Nazis with the European right and that has
made a comeback today.54 In these same conditions, we note a remarkable
affirmation of privilege in the institutional artworld, in phrases such as
‘There is nothing particularly realistic about the world today’ and ‘The
age of the customizable sneaker, political narrowcasting, algorithmic
taste, and individuated diet regimes has splintered the universal into a mul-
tiplicity of differences’ – both in the online-content section of the 9th Berlin

‘Leninism or Marxism?’, in
The Russian Revolution,
and Leninism or Marxism?,
University of Michigan
Press, Ann Arbor, 1961, p
92.
48 Benjamin Noys, Georges
Bataille: A Critical
Introduction, Pluto Press,
London, p 54. Indicatively,
as regards related anxieties
in the press, see ‘Lessons of
the 1930s: There Could Be
Trouble Ahead’, The
Economist, 10 December
2011, https://www.
economist.com/briefing/
2011/12/10/there-could-be-
trouble-ahead; also Paul
Mason, ‘Are We Living
Through Another 1930s?’,
The Guardian, 1 August
2016, https://www.
theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2016/aug/
01/are-we-living-through-
another-1930s-paul-
mason, both accessed 8
April 2019.
49 See Hal Foster, Recodings:
Art, Spectacle, Cultural
Politics, Bay Press, Seattle,
1985, p 121
50 Ibid, p 129
51 Ibid, p 132
52 On Evola see the detailed
Wikipedia entry at https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Julius_Evola, and Jason
Horowitz, ‘Steve Bannon
Cited Italian Thinker Who
Inspired Fascists’, The
New York Times, 10
February 2017, https://
www.nytimes.com/2017/
02/10/world/europe/
bannon-vatican-julius-
evola-fascism.html, both
accessed 10 April 2019. A
performance/talk titled
‘Julius Evola’ took place on
17 September 2019 in
Athens, Greece, in the
context of the programme
‘The Garden of Dystopian
Pleasures’ for BBQ Festival,
15–21 September 2018,
and was curated by the
Greek art group/duo Fyta
[Plants] with The Ministry
of Post-Truth. See https://
www.asfabbq.com/
participants-2018.html,
accessed 10 April 2019.
Fyta are far from a fringe
group in the Greek art
286
Biennale, ‘The Present in Drag’ (2016).55 For realism, or better reality in
its full materiality and non-individuated diet regimes, go to the Moria
refugee camp on Lesbos island, intended to tell the dispossessed on the
move ‘do not cross over, for this is how and where you will end up’.
And we doubt that the postmodern mantra of ‘the universal’ that ‘has
splintered into a multiplicity of differences’ would appear as an accurate
description of the world to the 4.1 million children living in poverty in
the UK, or to anti-fascists in Russia.56 In short, if postmodernism’s ‘any-
thing goes’ signalled, in the Cold War context, Western art’s freedom in
semiotic play, the tired extension of this ‘anything goes’ ideology into
our current social and political emergency denotes at least a lack of attend-
ance to the rift it installs between ‘art’ and ‘life’, or ‘the artworld’ and ‘the
real world’, or ‘abstraction’ (capital) and ‘concreteness’ (actually existing
social hierarchies of life and death outcomes).
For it is in the affirmation of this rift where we currently encounter
subtle or not-so-subtle, ignorant or knowing, justifications of the so-
called ‘platforming’ of positions that range between crypto- and neo-
fascism. This is fascism in the age of code: of messages and identifications
conveyed by memes, of resurrected anti-Semitic symbols, of 8chan, of
Reddit, of the intricate, inter-connected projects of the alt-right maze.57
The maze, to repeat, is not without contradictions. Some have identified
it with ‘an ideology torn between technophilic Futurism and neo-Ortho-
dox Traditionalism’ where ‘each of these fascist “postmodernisms” rep-
resents its own distinct variety or brand’.58 What is certain is that, as
argued by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg quoting Traverso, ‘the func-
tion of that [twentieth-century] violence – cultivating, spreading, and
exploiting fear – must now be read as served by modern media and com-
munication technology’.59 Ana Teixeira Pinto’s contribution to this
special issue examines in detail digital culture’s facilitation of the circula-
tion of an old, yet not abandoned, symbology. Indeed, Teixeira Pinto
refers to a ‘digital frontier’, her article opening with President Reagan’s
address at Moscow University in May 1988, during which he refers to
the ‘digital revolution’ while standing in front of a mural of the October
Revolution – clearly, no need for Teixeira Pinto to openly comment on
the semantics of the Reagan–Gorbachev Moscow Summit taking place
on the twentieth anniversary of May ‘68.60 Or rather, the significance
lies in omitting the mentioning: May ‘68 gets the non-mention it deserves
as a mere episode in a history with a grand opening (communist revolution
frozen in a mural) and a grand finale (live neoliberalism announcing the
means of capitalism’s global victory). Teixeira Pinto is interested in
what followed this announcement, and her analysis digs deep into the diz-
zying, rhizomatic connections between Artificial Intelligence, reactionary
philosophy and the mindcraft of social hatred for the ‘weak’ that consti-
tute an evolutionary ‘threat’. Did someone say ‘doubt’? Teixeira Pinto
takes a dark look into the distance crossed between doubt and conspiracy
theories as the ‘great many other implausible narratives whose rhetorical
function is not to express conviction but rather to signal ubiquitous cyni-
cism and generalised distrust’. This is the world of the dated and the
updated, of cybermonarchists and Darwinian transhumanists, a story
where mystification is a debilitating understatement and de-mystification
a carefully guarded implausibility. It is also the story of capital mutating
into a primordial drive, given that for neo-reactionaries (and their more
287
world, and the performance
was held at the National
School of Fine Arts. DC
Miller performed as Julius
Evola. See ASFA BBQ
tweet, 29 September 2018.
Those reading Greek can
see how Fyta justified the
accommodation of Evola in
their interview to the Greek
Skra-punk site, titled, in
English translation, ‘Why
Should One Have a Festival
about Post-truth in Athens?
Fyta Have the Answer’,
Skra-punk, 17 September
2018, http://skra-punk.
com/2018/09/17/giati-na-
kanei-kaneis-ena-festival-
gia-ti-meta-alitheia-stin-
athina-ta-fyta-echoyn-tin-
apantisi/, accessed 10 April
2019. In personal
communication with
Dimitrakaki as co-author of
this Introduction, a member
of Fyta explained that they
did not invite DC Miller but
rather Nina Power, ‘the
well-known Marxist
feminist’, who then
‘suggested a(n anonymous
until quite late) friend of
hers’. Email dated 8 May
2019, translated from
Greek. Nina Power talked
on ‘Edgelords vs
Edgeladies’ at the same
event.
53 The 2019 show of artist
Mathieu Malouf at Jenny’s
in Los Angeles was titled
#luketurnerisr****ded. For
details, see http://jennys.us/
exhibition/mathieu-
maloeuf/ and Matt
Stromberg, ‘Los Angeles
Gallery Opens Show With
Title Targeting Artist, Using
Ableist Slur [UPDATED]’,
Hyperallergic, 18 March
2019, https://hyperallergic.
com/490175/los-angeles-
gallery-opens-show-with-
title-targeting-artist-using-
ableist-slur/, both accessed
1 July 2019.
54 See Engel Engelstad and
Mimir Kristjansson, ‘The
Return of Judeo-
Bolshevism’, Jacobin, 16
February 2019, https://
www.jacobinmag.com/
2019/02/antisemitism-
judaism-bolsheviks-
socialists-conspiracy-
theories, accessed 1 July
2019
socially assertive variants), as put by Teixeira Pinto, ‘it is not capital that is
no longer a proper vehicle for humanity’s actualisation of its own essence;
rather, humanity is no longer a proper vehicle for capital’s actualisation of
its own essence’.
What becomes increasingly clear then is that, whilst a cursory glance at
the mainstream of politics since the collapse of Europe’s most notorious
fascist regimes in the 1940s would seem to reveal, despite partial gains
for the working class, a period of capitalist (eventually neoliberal) expan-
sion and consolidation as somehow free from fascism, this overlooks what
lurks in the shadows.61 In the field of politics, one cannot comprehend the
current situation in the UK without reading Stuart Hall from ‘back then’
(1979) and without factoring in those residues of fascism which sporadi-
cally re-congealed from the 1960s to the present day as the National
Front, the BNP (in its various guises), Combat 18, For Britain, UKIP
and the EDL (and SDL, WDL and UDL). Likewise, anti-fascism did not
simply recede upon the conclusion of World War II. Although less
visible as a mainstream force, it was present in the face of each of these
far-right resurgences.
Today, we need to attend to the ways in which (more than Benjamin’s
‘aestheticisation of politics’ thesis ever accounted for) culture becomes a
territory in the larger battleground – which does point to the significance
of the ‘superstructure’, as noted earlier. Ewa Majewska, in this issue, notes
that the Polish cultural sector has served as something of a refuge for an
anti-fascism hounded out of other spheres – where politics matter. In
the UK, it has for the most part not been at the ballot box or even in
the streets that the far right has won its victories; rather, it has been
through the media. Mainstream institutions continue to accommodate
mouthpieces of fascist values under the ludicrous (especially in the age
of stock-market and data-mining social media) liberal supposition that
they will choke on the oxygen of publicity, whilst YouTube has served
as a forum for alt-right celebrities, and as a space in which the ‘humorous’
everyday racisms of apparently innocuous Twitch streamers normalises
the othering practices that underpin fascism.62
The frequent mentions of the controversy surrounding London gallery
LD50’s unabashed espousal of far-right politics confirms art’s position
within this same cultural landscape, but the very same case demonstrates
art as a field in which anti-fascism is negotiated and finds fertile soil.63
Rose-Anne Gush’s contribution to this issue isolates the field of culture
as the space in which Austrian anti-fascism retained its momentum in
the face of an official national rhetoric that silenced any suggestions of
Austrian implication in fascist histories and practices. Gush looks specifi-
cally at the role of women in culture, including artist VALIE EXPORT and
writer Elfriede Jelinek, but also the role that fascism reserves for woman
(in the singular). Taking her cue from poet and author Ingeborg Bach-
mann, who never believed that ‘the virus of crime’ that had led to the
Holocaust outbreak had been eclipsed, Gush reconstructs the ‘para-
history’ in which Nazism continued its life after the public announcement
of its burial. Relatedly, Christina Bută and Charles Esche note culture’s
instrumentalisation in the service of an official practice of silencing
through their analysis of Holocaust and colonial memorialisation,
framed through the spectre of the ‘Never Again’ dictum, mobilised as a
means precisely of isolating fascism as an aberration. There is an

55 See http://bb9.
berlinbiennale.de/the-
present-in-drag-2/, accessed
9 June 2019. BB9, The
Present in Drag, 4 June–18
September 2016, was
curated by DIS
56 See http://www.cpag.org.
uk/content/child-poverty-
facts-and-figures and
Gabriel Levy, ‘Russia
Normalizes Torture in the
Case of Anti-fascists’, Red
Pepper, 9 February 2019,
https://www.redpepper.
org.uk/russia-normalises-
torture-in-case-against-
anti-fascists/, accessed 9
June 2019
57 Indicatively, see Simon
Zuylen-Wood et al,
‘Beyond Alt: The Extremely
Reactionary, Burn-It-
Down-Radical,
Newfangled Far Right’,
New York Magazine
Intelligencer, 30 April
2017, http://nymag.com/
intelligencer/2017/04/
beyond-alt-understanding-
the-new-far-right.html,
accessed 10 April 2019
58 Harrison Fluss and Landon
Frim, ‘Behemoth and
Leviathan: The Fascist
Bestiary of the Alt-Right’,
Salvage 5, 21 September
2017, http://salvage.zone/
in-print/behemoth-and-
leviathan-the-fascist-
bestiary-of-the-alt-right/,
accessed 10 June 2019
59 Levi and Rothberg,
‘Memory Studies in a
Moment of Danger’, op cit,
p 363
60 This remarkable scene is
also featured in Anselm
Franke and Ana Teixeira
Pinto, ‘Post-Political, Post-
Critical, Post-Internet: Why
Can’t Leftists Be More Like
Fascists?’, Open!, 8
September 2016, https://
www.onlineopen.org/post-
political-post-critical-post-
internet, accessed 7 June
2019, which focuses on
post-Internet art and the
9th Berlin Biennale for
Contemporary Art.
61 Europe’s history in relation
to fascism is less
homogeneous and far more
convoluted than this.
288
ongoing discussion on how the premise of lesser humans connects coloni-
alism to twentieth-century fascism; but how internet-liberated, daring-to-
be-politically-incorrect, pro-colonial conservatism meets neo-fascism in
the twenty-first century is an increasing concern. As put by Françoise
Vergès in relation to French history, ‘the conservatives “break taboos”’,
they de-complexify, ‘they dare to “say loudly what people think pri-
vately”’, and that includes ‘the civilizing mission’ and ‘the right to say
“no” to repeated demands to revise the national myth’.64 But the ‘civilis-
ing mission’ discourse is not exclusively French, British or Dutch. Rather,
conferred as a right to belong to the transnational club that manufactures
first-world-ism as cultural pride, it has been sold even to national consti-
tuencies that did not recently (or ever) enjoy the gains of having colonies,
thus defining a much broader supremacy arch, and this should be
addressed by contemporary anti-fascists. Bută and Esche note the dearth
of European public art pursuing connections between the racism that
underpinned the horrors of colonisation and the racism that became even-
tually the genocidal ‘final solution’ policy of the Nazis, seeing such a col-
lective public art project as the missing link in the narrative that
contemporary anti-fascism in art, and generally, must piece together. As
demonstrated in both contributions, the production of culture has been
a site and a process in which the continuities of the clusters of values com-
prising fascism have both been actively suppressed and most defiantly sus-
tained, and for this reason, above all else, the analysis of (anti-)fascism
through art and culture is a task of import. As a number of contributors
to this special issue suggest (but especially Bută and Esche), racism and
the memory narratives around racialisation as violence cannot but be an
integral aspect of any effort to combat fascism, no matter how incipient
its iteration.
Significantly, Bută and Esche include among their artistic references
examples of anti-colonial performative action that, as they state, ‘are
close to acts of political vandalism’. Although they propose a general
inclusion into art of such actions, they do so with possible scepticism,
seeing such inclusion as ‘a moot point’. Another contribution to this
special issue departs unapologetically from this position, arguing instead
for a reconstituted integration of an expanded heroic into art as anti-
fascist social practice. Panos Kompatsiaris queries the normative suppres-
sion of ‘gestures of negation’ in the civic spaces of what we might call
merely discursive agonism (Chantal Mouffe is cited in his article) where
‘a strategy of moderation and compromise’ prevails. In 2019, it is
indeed hard not to see the mainstreaming of the anti-heroic in contempor-
ary social practice, embraced by the art institution, as some version of
Margaret Thatcher’s beloved TINA, the ‘there is no alternative’ dogma,
which, having so far underwritten the f(r)iction of global capital’s Pax
Romana envisioned by Francis Fukuyama at the end of Cold War, is cur-
rently being challenged by far-right anti-system posturing.65 As Kompat-
siaris contends, the issue is how not to ‘miss the fact that fascism, racism,
patriarchy and capitalism are themselves grand narratives, supported
materially by enormously powerful institutions and industrial, military
and carceral complexes’. This is precisely the point missed by ‘good’ post-
modernism, discussed earlier, and which must not be missed by what
Kompatsiaris calls ‘emancipatory anti-fascism’. In this framework, Kom-
patsiaris looks at the work of Natasha A Kelly, Mary Zygouri and Pyotr
289
Franco’s Spain (1936–
1975) and the Greek
military junta (1967–1974)
are obvious cases that
complicate post-war
Europe’s relationship to
fascism. From another
perspective, noted by
Foucault about the new
power of the post-de Gaulle
bourgeoisie in France, how
history as memory was
shaped after the 1940s is
also important for
understanding the
trajectory of fascism in the
continent. Foucault says:
‘Since memory is an
important factor in struggle
(indeed, it‘s within a kind of
conscious dynamic of
history that struggles
develop), if you hold
people‘s memory, you hold
their dynamism. And you
also hold their experience,
their knowledge of previous
struggles. You make sure
that they no longer know
what the Resistance was
actually about.’ See
Foucault in ‘Anti-retro’, op
cit.
62 At the time of writing, the
saga of YouTube serving as
a platform for neo-Nazis,
supremacy material and
hate speech is ongoing.
Indicatively, see Julia
Alexander, ‘YouTube’s new
policies are catching
educators, journalists, and
activists in the crossfire’,
The Verge, 7 June 2019,
https://www.theverge.com/
2019/6/7/18657112/
youtube-hate-policies-
educators-journalists-
activists-crossfire-
takedown-demonetization,
accessed 9 June 2019.
63 On the story of London’s
LD50 gallery see,
indicatively, Hannah Ellis-
Petersen, ‘Art Gallery
Criticised over Neo-Nazi
Artwork and Hosting
Racist Speakers’, The
Guardian, 22 February
2017, https://www.
theguardian.com/uk-news/
2017/feb/22/art-gallery-
criticised-over-neo-nazi-
artwork-and-hosting-
racist-speakers; O D
Untermesh, ‘Is It Ok to
Punch a Nazi (Art
Gallery)?’, Mute, 16
Pavlensky in terms of, respectively, a politics of experience, a politics of
affective memory, and a politics of parrhesia – all connected with the
heroic and the registers of heroism (rather than the hero) and with a poten-
tial antidote to what, following from Benjamin all the way to Traverso,
has been the curse of left melancholy. To draw a possible loop, this is
where we might look for an answer, however tentative, to the question
of whether de-mystificatory anti-fascism can engage affect. If, a few
years back, the left had responded to T J Clark’s pragmatism-in-despair
in his ‘For a Left with No Future’ by flagging up the complexity of
failure and success when thinking about emancipatory struggles and the
scope for revolution, we now have to ask if and how art, in theory and
in practice, is prepared to work against its own entrapment by the prevail-
ing ethics of the eternal management of fascism as an eternal ‘evil’.66
A Few Concluding Fears
Importantly for us, Leslie’s discussion on doubt and anti-fascism also
refers to a long essay by Fortini (poet but also an exceptionally skilled
essayist), written in the mid-1960s, and called ‘The Writers’ Mandate
and the End of Anti-Fascism’. We would have liked to have included
further reflections in this special issue on Fortini’s essay which, in our
view, should be today studied closely by anti-fascist art and cultural
workers as much as by anti-fascist intellectuals – and not only because
Fortini did not see anti-fascism as a necessary, let alone official, politics
beyond the specificity of an era or, indeed, a context.67 Fortini worked
overall ‘against the commonplace conceptions of intellectual life that per-
meated the Left’.68 His essay offers an exemplary navigation of the com-
plexity of positions within the literary and artistic left in the twentieth
century (also taking the plot back to the nineteenth century at times).
The nuanced articulation of the differences between the Western left
and the trajectory of the East European left, especially in culture, with
the tragedy of interwar German communism and anti-fascism as an
instructive case study, looms large in the poetics of Fortini’s narration.
He wrote: ‘all that will be left by way of testimony of the age, amid the
rising reality of the physical slaughter of political and trade union
cadres, will be the literary and poetic word’.69 One of our fears at
present is: what if the testimony of our age does not even leave behind a
large body of anti-fascist words while we witness the policy-based drown-
ing of refugees and the emerging reality of the massacre of the Amazonian
Indigenous fighting against Bolsonaro’s commitment to neoliberalism and
of the Marielle Franco of this world fighting against police violence and
the subjugation (mental, corporeal, affective) this violence reproduces?70
It is not an unfounded fear, but to this we add the reality-check fear
that, so far in this century, no anti-fascist words have been enough to
curb the ascent of the far right, in its murderous intent, fortification of
supremacy values, and acts of parliamentary incursion.
This is not a fictitious enemy, but one made manifest in the obscene
reality of the body count, the experience of being made abject, the prefi-
gurative demolition of an alternative to the long-established order of
power. Even where the left can say that ‘a fascist seizure of power is not
an immediate threat’, it still has to admit, in the same sentence, that ‘the

February 2017, http://
www.metamute.org/
editorial/articles/it-ok-to-
punch-nazi-art-gallery;
Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘The
Art Right’, Art Monthly
405, April 2017, https://
www.artmonthly.co.uk/
magazine/site/article/the-
art-right-by-larne-abse-
gogarty-april-2017, all
accessed 18 June 2019.
64 Françoise Vergès, ‘There
Are No Blacks in France:
Fanonian Discourse, “the
Dark Night of Slavery”,
and the French Civilizing
Mission Reconsidered’,
Theory, Culture & Society,
vol 27, nos 7/8, 2010, pp
99–111, here p 102
65 Francis Fukuyama, The
End of History and the Last
Man, Free Press, New York,
1992. Amusingly (or not),
the liberal political scientist
Fukuyama revised his
position in light of
developments, blaming an
expanded identity (or
recognition) politics for the
rise of anti-liberalism. See
Louis Menard, ‘Francis
Fukuyama Postpones the
End of History’, The
New Yorker, 27 August
2018, https://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/
2018/09/03/francis-
fukuyama-postpones-the-
end-of-history, accessed 11
April 2019. This article also
includes information on
Fukuyama’s talk at the
University of Chicago in
February 1988, where his
later famous analysis was
first presented. As the
article notes, back in the
late 1980s, Fukuyama’s
argument was that, with the
imminent collapse of the
Soviet Union, the last
ideological alternative to
liberalism had been
eliminated. Fascism had
been killed off in the Second
World War, and now
Communism was
imploding.
66 See T J Clark, ‘For a Left
with No Future’, New Left
Review 75, March/April
2012, pp 53–75, and the
responses by Susan
Watkins, ‘Presentism?’,
New Left Review 74, 2012,
290
social and political conditions for the renewed growth and confidence of
fascist movements do exist’.71 And it is only from a position of not experi-
encing this fascist effect in one’s own skin and life that one can say: anyone
can potentially be a fascist, so don’t point the finger! But this cheap psy-
chologism is misleading. Even if we made the concession (which we do
not) of seeing fascism as rooted in something called human nature,
nature – human or other – has a history. And it would be in this history
of nature, and therefore in the procession of socio-economic antagonisms
it is bred by, where one day the fascist law of attraction appeared (that is,
where fascism was made desirable). The concept of ‘law’ is a historical and
eminently human invention: laws pertaining to social formations can be
changed. Playing a key role in the twenty-first-century reconfiguring of
the man-machine and supermen fantasies of earlier fascisms, technophilic
neo-reactionaries and their various mutations are well aware that nature
and law are not unalterable. Yet, invoking the unalterable-primordial is
at the heart of the imbrication of occultism and fascism, either in the
past or today, as occultism, much like religion (nearly always implicated
in fascist mentality), imagines immutable extra-human, ahistorical
forces as the ground for the destiny of power, and affiliates to necropolitics
as biopolitics through this myth – hence the attachment to symbology.
Leaving human nature or supernatural fancy aside, we can return to
Fortini, whose essay elaborates on the harrowing historical specificity of
fascism and the determinants of the choice – especially for those fighting
against capitalist brutality – whether to be anti-fascist or not. Insofar as
fascism is found to be a defence of the capitalist order and the power struc-
ture it relies on, to be an anti-fascist is not a light choice, and the argu-
ments against this choice – the draining of energy best invested in class
struggle, or effectively fighting in support of the unjust, if threatened,
order – must be reviewed both in relation to a given juncture and in
light of the lessons of history.72 We find useful a clarification on anti-
fascism given by American activists:
Anti-fascist work is done as a piece of, and not a replacement for, a larger
radical vision. Anti-fascism is comparable to political prisoner work. No
one claims that supporting our imprisoned comrades will bring down capit-
alism, the state, and hierarchy, but it is a necessary piece of background
work that we feel must be done.73 (emphasis added)
Although the synergy of art and activism has been widely discussed in
recent years, we look to the above quote for its attention to anti-fascism as
‘background work’ that at times becomes necessary within a larger trans-
formative imperative. Coming from an anti-capitalist, feminist perspec-
tive, we would call anti-fascism also maintenance work: this definition
not only permits the heroic to enter a dialectical (rather than oppositional)
relationship with the everyday but also subtends a critical awareness of
what is needed for the reproduction of emancipatory social movements
that, in their discrete yet connected struggles, stand against the fate capit-
alism is imagining for life – and, for that matter, art. Working towards an
art theory and practice that engages anti-fascism, as the driving concept
for this special issue, is such background/maintenance ideological work
committed to highlighting with urgency the pillars of the current structure
291
pp 77–102 and Alberto
Toscano, ‘Politics in a
Tragic Key’, Radical
Philosophy 180, July/
August 2013, pp 25–34
67 Again, we would like to
thank the reviewer of this
article for helping us with
the complexity of Fortini’s
position on anti-fascism.
68 Alberto Toscano,
‘Communism without
Guarantees: On Franco
Fortini’, Salvage, 18
September 2015, http://
salvage.zone/in-print/
communism-without-
guarantees-on-franco-
fortini/, accessed 11 April
2019
69 See Franco Fortini, A Test
of Powers: Writings on
Criticism and Literary
Institutions, trans Alberto
Toscano, Seagull Press,
Kolkata, 2016, p 226
70 Marielle Franco (1979–
2018) was a black, gay
activist and Rio de Janeiro
city councillor raised in the
favelas. See Sally Sara,
‘Marielle Franco’s Murder
Becomes a Rallying Point
for Brazilians Troubled by
Growing Violence’, ABC
News, 8 April 2019, https://
www.abc.net.au/news/
2019-04-09/who-killed-
outspoken-brazilian-
politician-marielle-franco/
10926102, accessed 9 April
2019. As noted in the
article, ‘the city councillor
was assassinated on March
14, 2018, when nine bullets
were fired into her car,
killing her and her driver.
She had just taken part in a
round table discussion on
black women in power and
was a fierce critic of police
violence.’ The article also
notes that ‘the militias are
run by current and former
police and army officers.
President Bolsonaro is
facing increasing demands
to [sic] his family’s alleged
of power. In this respect, anti-fascism can be a critical pedagogy of the art
field enacted across discourses and practices engaged in emancipatory pol-
itical education. To the argument that anti-fascism distracts from the real
battle we would counter-pose that the exigency which anti-fascism renders
visible can be eye-opening for at least some among those who have so far
avoided considering what ‘normal life’ is made of at our juncture.
Yet, in this respect, the most useful or, more accurately, haunting,
question addressed by Fortini is over the formation of anti-fascism in
terms of an alliance – in other words (also Fortini’s words), of the
popular front.74 What are the political sacrifices or concessions to be
made for the rise of a popular front against fascism made across a spec-
trum of positions, when some such positions exist in ideological conflict
– given that, although fascism is a weapon of capitalism in its ethno-
racial and gendered articulation and neo-colonial operations, it also threa-
tens any emancipatory gains made by struggling within capitalism?75 This
is effectively the question concluding the roundtable discussion on anti-
fascism, art and theory. It is a lingering and unanswered question,
especially as it is located in a discussion that opens by decrying the art
field’s ideological alignment with a liberalism that, so far, refuses to
study as a priority the history of fascism and anti-fascism in the literary
and artistic landscapes of the twentieth century in terms of political out-
comes.
Of course, one might be tempted to say that the terrain is different in
the early twenty-first century – a time in which, as already stated, fascism’s
hounding of the ‘red scare’, that is fascism as anti-communism, can only
be prefigurative or preventive; a time in which the reign of global
capital articulated as an ‘empire’ (to remember Hardt and Negri from
2000) somehow still dilutes the prospect of fascist empires gratifying the
imagined superiority of imagined communities (read: nations) in the
minds of many; a time in which something called ‘microfascism’ is
described as ‘the desire for trains to run on time’ or else the imperative
‘they should follow the rules!’;76 a time of data mining and ‘algorithmic
force’;77 and after all, if Fortini’s analysis considered alliances, questions,
contestations and contradictions, and reflected on when the fascist war
machine was threatening civilisation as a whole, nowadays it is capitalist
climate destruction that poses the same threat but with less resistance and
determination than that generated by historical, empire-dreaming fascisms
– yet, predictably, with the revival of eco-fascism and its genocidal sol-
ution.78 But then, the specificity of the terrain already tells us how contem-
porary anti-fascism must connect the dots that pronounce our historical
misfortune. Having to think about art theory and practice in relation to
anti-fascism is symptomatic of the latter, while the art field is merely a
site in the geometry of the joined dots. And what the analyses and perspec-
tives that make up this special issue try to think through is at least some of
the ways in which this historical misfortune is not to be understood in
terms of a historical accident – this being our greatest fear.
ORCID
Angela Dimitrakaki http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1281-5947

links to the militias. He denies any
connections to the alleged killers of
Marielle Franco.’
71 As noted in Charlie Post, ‘Fascism and
Anti-fascism: Reflections on Recent
Debates on the US Left’, Salvage, 10
October 2017, http://salvage.zone/
online-exclusive/fascism-and-anti-
fascism-reflections-on-recent-debates-
on-the-us-left/, accessed 22 June 2019:
‘Economic stagnation and falling
living conditions among broad
sections of the middle and working
classes, combined with the twin crises
of traditional capitalist politics and of
the organizations of working and
oppressed people provide a fertile
environment for the growth of fascist
gangs. The electoral success of right-
wing populists like Trump provides a
“wind at their back” and encourages
them to take to the streets for the first
time in almost twenty years. Put
simply, the growth of fascism is a real
danger for the left, working people
and the oppressed. We need to stop
them now, when they are still a
marginal and despised movement.’
72 See ‘Against Anti-fascism: Amadeo
Bordiga’s Last Interview’, libcom.org,
24 November 2017, https://libcom.
org/library/against-anti-fascism-
amadeo-bordiga-s-last-interview, and,
for a history of arguments against
anti-fascism, see A M Gittlitz, ‘Anti-
Anti-Antifa’, Commune 2, spring
2019, https://communemag.com/anti-
anti-antifa/, both accessed 11 April
2019.
73 The quote from NYC/Philly Antifa is
given in Gittlitz, ibid.
74 Understandably, there is a revived
interest in the idea of the popular front
today, not least in relation to art and
literature. Indicatively, see Elinor
Taylor, The Popular Front Novel in
Britain, 1934–1940, Haymarket,
London, 2019.
75 The historical distinction between a
united front defined by the (relative)
ideological coherence of the left, where
anti-fascism originated, and a popular
front mobilising broader forces against
fascism remains important. See Paul
Krehbiel, ‘United and Popular Front:
Lessons from 1935–2017’, PORTSIDE,
8 June 2017, https://portside.org/2017-
06-08/united-and-popular-front-
lessons-1935-2017, accessed 1 July
2019.
76 See Caemeron Crain, ‘Microfascism’,
The Mantle, 5 June 2013, http://www.
292
themantle.com/philosophy/
microfascism, accessed 9 April 2019, in
which the author discusses Deleuze and
Guattari’s analysis of fascism in relation
to desire. On prefigurative anti-
communism, see Dimitrakaki, ‘Left with
TINA’, op cit.
77 Dan McQuillian, ‘Algorithmic Force &
Fascism’, The Occupied Times, 26 April
2015, https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=
13764; on digital anti-fascism see Doug
Bock Clark, ‘Meet Antifa’s Secret
Weapon against Far-right Extremists’,
Wired, 16 January 2018, https://www.
wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-
antifa-data-mining/, both accessed 24
June 2019.
78 Indicatively, see Jason Wilson, ‘Eco-
fascism Is Undergoing a Revival in the
Fetid Culture of the Extreme Right’, The
Guardian, 19 March 2019, https://
www.theguardian.com/world/
commentisfree/2019/mar/20/eco-
fascism-is-undergoing-a-revival-in-the-
fetid-culture-of-the-extreme-right,
accessed 5 July 2019. It is also
interesting to read from a contemporary
perspective Michael E Zimmerman’s
‘The Threat of Ecofascism’, Social
Theory and Practice, vol 21, no 2,
summer 1995, pp 207–238.