#alberto toscano

[kenotype]

[fiercynn]

The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate

Green-lit by Western governments and described by myriad human rights law experts as demonstrating clear ‘genocidal intent’, the State of Is

Green-lit by Western governments and described by myriad human rights law experts as demonstrating clear ‘genocidal intent’, the State of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood October 7 attack has also elicited talk of fascism in multiple quarters. In a collective statement, the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees has spoken of ‘colonial fascism’ and of the ‘pornographic call to death of Arabs by settler Zionist politicians across the political lines’; in their own declaration, the Communist Party of Israel (Maki) and the left-wing coalition Hadash ‘put the full responsibility on the fascist right-wing government for the sharp and dangerous escalation’; meanwhile, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro described the onslaught on Gaza as the ‘first experiment to deem all of us disposable’ in a ‘global 1933’ marked by climate catastrophe and capitalist entrenchment. Even quoting these lines probably falls foul of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has served as an important instrument in efforts to curtail peaceful international solidarity activism against Israeli apartheid, especially in the guise of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.  And yet the recognition of an incipient fascism in the latest Netanyahu government and even Israeli society at large seems, if not mainstream, certainly prominent in public discourse in Israel itself, not least in the wake of protests against the recent judicial reforms aimed at eviscerating the vaunted autonomy of Israel’s Supreme Court. Four days before the Hamas attack, the newspaper Ha’aretz published an editorial under the heading ‘Israeli Neo-Fascism Threatens Israelis and Palestinians Alike’. One month earlier 200 Israeli high school students declared their refusal to be conscripted thus: ‘We decided that we cannot, in good faith, serve a bunch of fascist settlers that are in control of the government right now.’ In May, a Ha’aretz editorial opined that the ‘sixth Netanyahu government is beginning to look like a totalitarian caricature. There is almost no move associated with totalitarianism that has not been proposed by one of its extremist members and adopted by the rest of the incompetents it comprises, in their competition to see who can be more fully full fascist,’ while one of its editorialists described an ‘Israeli fascist revolution’ ticking off all items in the checklist, from virulent racism to a contempt for weakness, from a lust for violence to anti-intellectualism. [x]

- alberto toscano for verso on october 19, 2023

[sharpened--edges]

In her reflections on the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt wrote that ‘secrecy—what diplomatically is called discretion as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government—and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history.’ [‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’] While this is undoubtedly the case, what is novel about the current period is not only the fact that secrecy has been generalised […] but that the black world has swelled in size as a driving component of the military-industrial complex. This does not just impact the art of government, but has insidious effects on society as a whole. [Trevor] Paglen captures this well when, echoing earlier arguments about the permanent arms economy, military Keynesianism, and the inextricable relationship between militarism, imperialism and late capitalism, he concludes that the ‘black world is much more than an archipelago of secret bases. It is a secret basis underlying much of the American economy.’ [Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World, p. 277]

Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero, 2015), pp. 66–7.

[s-hayashi]

Crisis and Critique (Volume 4, issue 2, Nov 2017)

Bolshevik Revolution: One Hundred Years After

Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Christoph Menke, Warren Montag, Alberto Toscano, etc.

LINK (Table of Contents)

PDF (Free Download: the full edition)

[cebra-gris]

Ernst Bloch approached fascism not as a political instrument or a psychological pathology, but as a perverted utopian promise. Despite the important elements he overlooked, this perspective allowed the German philosopher to identify the popular and energizing features of fascism, which, in his opinion, its Marxist and communist adversaries had failed to either effectively confront or mobilize for their own ends.

Ernst Bloch abordaba el fascismo no como un instrumento político o una patología psíquica, sino como una promesa utópica pervertida. A pesar de los importantes elementos que no tenía en cuenta, esta visión permitía al filósofo alemán identificar los rasgos populares y energizantes del fascismo que, en su opinión, sus adversarios marxistas y comunistas no habían conseguido ni confrontar eficazmente ni movilizar para sus propios fines.

Bloch understood that Germany in the 1930s was a country inhabited not only by a disillusioned citizenry, a restless working class, and concerned exploiters. The crisis had brought to light the "asynchronous people": the decaying inhabitants of pasts whose hopes remained unfulfilled, easily recruited into the ranks of reaction. The racist and conspiratorial secrecy of the Nazis and their sympathizers took advantage of this lived experience of uneven development. The collective emotional effect was a "repressed anger" that they were able to exploit and exacerbate. How were they going to confront a situation in which a "capitalist and monopolistic upper class […] uses gothic dreams against proletarian realities"?

Bloch entiende que la Alemania de la década de 1930 era un país habitado no solo por una ciudadanía desencantada, por una clase trabajadora inquieta y por explotadores preocupados. La crisis había sacado a la luz a la «gente asincrónica»: a los habitantes en decadencia de unos pasados cuyas esperanzas seguían sin cumplirse, fáciles de reclutar en las filas de la reacción. El ocultismo racista y conspiratorio de los nazis y de sus simpatizantes se aprovechó de esta experiencia vivida de desarrollo irregular. El efecto emocional colectivo era una «ira reprimida» que pudieron explotar y agravar, ¿cómo iban a enfrentarse a una situación en la que una «clase alta capitalista y monopolista […] usa los sueños góticos contra las realidades proletarias»?

This excerpt from the book is interesting because of how it addresses and highlights the irrational side of fascism, not as a character flaw, as Wilhelm Reich would also say during those years he lived through it, but as a way of using myth to articulate itself when it falls behind in social development and finds that conventional politics aren't improving their lives. Something new is needed to disrupt the system and recover the lost glory (and well-being) of the past. Does this sound familiar? But we're not looking for similarities, but rather ways to combat it today. I'll continue sharing anything I find interesting in my reading…

Este fragmento que os expongo del libro es interesante por como aborda y resalta el lado irracional del fascismo pero no como enfermedad del carácter, como diría Wilhelm Reich también en esos años que lo vivió, sino como que usa lo mítico para articularse al quedar atrás en el desarrollo social y encontrarse que la política al uso no mejoraba sus vidas y hacía falta algo nuevo que irrumpiera en el sistema para recuperarse la gloria (y bienestar perdido) del pasado. ¿Les suena de algo? pero no estamos buscando parecidos, sino maneras de combatirlo hoy, seguiré dando que encuentre interesante en mi lectura…

[thelonguepuree]

Object-extraordinaire of a new-materialist microphysics of the subject, biocapitalist frameworks, and the micrologizing drives of ontological orientations, the molecular names a theoretical conjuncture and conceptual abstraction that calls out to be understood in historical context. What I am calling the molecularization of sexuality is my entry point into that project. In what follows, I wish to focus attention on the molecular’s intersection with queerness, and ask a very simple question: what might queer studies have to illuminate about the ontological turn? My approach … is animated by what the theorist Joel Olson has called a “fanatical approach.” In his unfinished manuscript, American Zealot, Olson poses fanaticism as a tradition of engaged radicalism that occupies a structural position “outside the realm of respectable politics.” Fanaticism, that is, functions as that denigrated location that, as Alberto Toscano has argued, is coded as an “excess of politics,” and thus external to the sphere conceived as legitimately political. I want to suggest that current ontological thought has made its home in this interstice: the space between what is considered properly political and that which is derided as fanatical. What do I mean by a “home in this interstice?” The separation of radicalism from rationality—or the separation of a genuinely emancipatory fanaticism from realpolitik—took place long ago, is constitutive of Enlightenment rationality and liberal governmentality, and is not in need of review here. The point, rather, has to do with the ways in which the ontological turn borrows from a long tradition of radical bewilderment, but unlike the kinds of committed, engaged fervor traditionally linked to fanaticism, substitutes a kind of sheer bewilderment that depoliticizes and obscures the fissure between fanaticism and what has been authorized as recognizably political. The ontological turn, in other words, equips itself with the fanatical character of radicalism, but only as a kind of technical sheen. What I am saying is that, central to ontological thought is a flourishing of the limit to that thought, a limit that becomes internal to and constitutive of that thought. That limit is politics.

Jordy Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event, 17.2, 2014

This article is so full of brilliance and snark I can’t even

[thelonguepuree]

Whether we are concerned with the unmasking of commodity fetishism, the formalization of surplus value, or the discourse on alienation, it is difficult to ignore that much of the force of the Marxian matrix—when compared to contemporary discourses of abstraction with their frequent reliance on notions of complexity and information—is based on its depiction of capitalism as the culture of abstraction par excellence, as a society that, pace many of the more humanist denunciations of the dominant ideology, is really driven, in many respects, by abstract entities, traversed by powers of abstraction

Alberto Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction”

[sharpened--edges]

In its student component, political action in universities appears ... as twice ephemeral: it rests on a relatively rapid turnover in its collective basis (as well as on the timing of teaching terms, exams, etc.), and it is drawn – in no small part by a critical vocation to map the social totality – beyond itself, to tackle greater authorities, to merge into broader struggles. The sociological imagination of the students at Nanterre, who were among the catalysts of the Parisian May, revealed as much: ‘The unit of reference, the university, is not viable. The contradictions occur on the level of society as a whole, and the university is implicated in them.’

Alberto Toscano, “The University as a Political Space,” in The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, edited by Michael Bailey and Des Freedman (Pluto, 2011, pp. 81–90), p. 83.